The Techlords and Their Ideology Are Mortal Enemies of Humanity
The Techlords and Their Ideology Are Mortal Enemies of Humanity
The techlords intend to bring humanity to the brink of collapse and then, in a magic trick, rise to power, saving the species or themselves as the last specimens.joao-camargo (Common Dreams)
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Does AI need to be perfect to replace jobs?
As always, I use the term "AI" loosely. I'm referring to these scary LLMs coming for our jobs.
It's important to state that I find LLMs to be helpful in very specific use cases, but overall, this is clearly a bubble, and the promises of advance have not appeared despite hundreds of billion of VC thrown at the industry.
So as not to go full-on polemic, we'll skip the knock-on effects in terms of power-grid and water stresses.
No, what I want to talk about is the idea of software in its current form needing to be as competent as the user.
Simply put: How many of your coworkers have been right 100% of the time over the course of your career? If N>0, say "Hi" to Jesus for me.
I started working in high school, as most of us do, and a 60% success rate was considered fine. At the professional level, I've seen even lower with tenure, given how much things turn to internal politics past a certain level.
So what these companies are offering is not parity with senior staff (Ph.D.-level, my ass), but rather the new blood who hasn't had that one fuckup that doesn't leave their mind for weeks.
That crucible is important.
These tools are meant to replace inexperience with incompetence, and the beancounters at some clients are likely satisfied those words look similar enough to pass muster.
We are, after all, at this point, the "good enough" country. LLM marketing is on brand.
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India ‘successfully tests’ nuclear-capable missile able to reach deep into China
India ‘successfully tests’ nuclear-capable missile able to reach deep into China
Agni-5 intermediate-range ballistic missile also part of Narendra Modi’s defence strategy against PakistanGuardian staff reporter (The Guardian)
Brazil authorities suspend key Amazon rainforest protection measure
Brazil authorities suspend key Amazon rainforest protection measure
Suspension of Soy moratorium could open up area of rainforest the size of Portugal to destructionJonathan Watts (The Guardian)
Chile president condemns ‘obvious irresponsibility’ after fan violence suspends Copa Sudamericana match
Chile president condemns ‘obvious irresponsibility’ after fan violence suspends Copa Sudamericana match
The Universidad de Chile v Independiente match was abandoned after violent clashes between fans resulted in serious injuries and more than 300 arrestsGuardian staff reporter (The Guardian)
Italian police arrest Ukrainian man over Nord Stream pipelines blast
Italian police arrest Ukrainian man over Nord Stream pipelines blast
Serhiy K is believed to have been onboard boat from where 2022 attack on gas pipelines was carried outKate Connolly (The Guardian)
I have some questions about soulseek. (Hopefully this fits here)
Hello, i've been thinking about using soulseek for the very first time to download some music and such. I had a couple of questions from the c/piracy community.
- Do i need to stay logged in on soulseek even if i am or am not sharing stuff? Obviously i can't be online and have my pc powered on 24/7 as i have a life outside the web (and other things aswell). so i hope that's understandable as to why i asked, i was worried i'd get banned if i don't be online like all the time.
- Would a vpn work just fine with soulseek even if the vpn has support for port forwarding? There's an obvious reason as to why i'd use one.
- Which soulseek client should i use, Nicotine+? or soulseek's actual client (i use Linux Mint, in case y'all were wondering. I might move to debian though!)
That's all i want to ask for now, hopefully these aren't dumb to ask.
I'll be waiting for replies (might not reply to all of them so i apologize), thanks!
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I'm not sure about question 1, but I think the answer is yes, you do need to be logged in to share unless you have some other setup going on like a dedicated server or something. I just use it on my PC and try to leave it on when I can, but nobody ever seems to download from me, haha.
- I use a VPN, haven't had any issues or had to configure anything for it specifically.
- I do use nicotine+ (also on Linux) because I had some issues with the actual program downloaded from their website. Not sure what it was because I didn't really try to fix it after I found out about Nicotine+. It works great.
No problemo! The only thing I've run into with regards to being banned by other users is to not have anything or very little available for download. I got a warning from someone I downloaded from when I first joined because my library was very small and I didn't have my filesystem figured out yet so I was sharing the wrong folders.
Also on my end, when I have a download queued for weeks or sometimes months, and the user never seems to log in, that can be frustrating. But I'm like you I don't have my computer on 24/7, just try to be available when I can and have my whole music folder available for sharing, haven't gotten any complaints yet.
I’ve been using soulseek for like 20 years and it’s awesome. You don’t have to be logged on constantly, never had an issue with it before, basically only turn my computer on if I want to download something.
Not sure about the VPN, but I don’t think it’ll matter.
I use the base soulseek client. It’s simple and easy and works great. Never tried another one though.
Nicotine+ is great.
If Docker is your thing, slskd is good.
GitHub - slskd/slskd: A modern client-server application for the Soulseek file sharing network.
A modern client-server application for the Soulseek file sharing network. - slskd/slskdGitHub
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Per the readme,
Once the container is running you can access the web UI over HTTP on port 5030, or HTTPS on port 5031. The default username and password are slskd and slskd, respectively. You'll want to change these if the application will be internet facing.
Ha sorry, wasn't specific, to the soulseek network after, it errors out with: Failed to reconnect: "Username may not be null or an empty string (Parameter 'username')
I remember creating an account... Somewhere? (it's been months since I initially attempted lol)
SLSKD_SLSK_USERNAME and SLSKD_SLSK_PASSWORD
Love soulseek but please do try and share some stuff and leave you computer on from time to time so that other people can search / download what you are sharing. Whilst it isn't a requirement and you won't get banned for not doing so it is basic etiquette in my opinion and without people sharing resources like these will slowly die.
In terms of clients I would suggest trying both out. The majority of people recommend nicotine+ but personally I don't understand it, I find the official client much better even though it has a few quirks mainly due to searching and navigating others files seems to be a lot better in my experience.
I doubt anyone cares at all. You get a fair amount of snobs who will lock their files up and ask for specific trades or for bandcamp vouchers in exchange for access to what they have but I don't converse with those types personally. If I see them I usually block them from downloading anything of mine out of principle because I can't stand that attitude.
However everyone else I've interacted with there are more concerned about the quality and don't really care of origin or anything like that.
Obviously i can’t be online and have my pc powered on 24/7 as i have a life outside the web
You... don't have to sit in front of your computer while it's on... leave it on and go to work/school/sleep. Sharing is caring. 🙂
No, i just thought when i said something about a soulseek client i kinda thought someone would ask "wait what operating system do you use?" and i thought it would've been alright to clarify about that. Putting that in the post wasn't supposed to be some variant of the arch btw meme.
My apologies for the confusion.
That would be kinda funny lmao, speaking of linux.. i might probably move over to debian! i heard that new debian update came out (which is Debian 13) and i just thought it wouldn't hurt to use that one, i have used debian too in fact! debian 12 felt cozy much like how mint is cozy. (And debian is also where i tried KDE for the very first time and loved it ever since!)
I have also used arch before for a good while, but i moved back to mint for a bit cause i kinda got tired of constantly having to update stuff every single time. I loved arch too though! However, i usually used archinstall to just install arch. I never really bothered with manually installing arch myself much like how i've seen many arch users do
Record solar growth keeps China’s CO2 falling in first half of 2025
Analysis: Record solar growth keeps China’s CO2 falling in first half of 2025 - Carbon Brief
Clean-energy growth helped China’s CO2 emissions fall by 1% in first half of 2025, extending a declining trend that started in March 2024.Lauri Myllyvirta (Carbon Brief)
Truncated community view
How come this Lemmy community only shows the last 15 posts / 10 months worth of posts on Piefed?
This community or this community (from the same Lemmy instance) too are clipped, but they both show a year's worth.
Does it have something to do with the date at which the first PieFed user join them?
I know Lemmy instances only start mirroring a community hosted on another instance when someone on that instance joins it. But after that someone joined and the instance is done mirroring the community, the whole of it is browseable.
If I had to guess, I'd say Piefed instances only mirror the 15 last posts after the first user joins, or a years's worth, whichever applies. Correct?
And if so, does this also apply to native Piefed communities? In other words, does Piefied "disappear" older posts in Piefed communities?
@rimu@piefed.social might be able to answer better and more specifically since he is the admin for piefed.social, but here is some info on what might be happening.
Federation in piefed works the same as it does in lemmy...in that piefed won't get posts for a community unless a local user is subscribed to it (lemmy provides the most recent 20 posts to an instance when the first subscriber joins). So, until a user from piefed.social subscribed to those communities, then no posts would show up. As a corollary to this, if there is one local subscriber that then unsubscribes, posts will stop federating over. So, that can cause things like gaps in federation.
As for automatic deletion of older posts...this is something that a piefed admin can do on a community by community basis. When it is turned on for a community, that retention policy is listed in the community sidebar. For instance, if you look at the sidebar of !anime@ani.social, you will see that posts are retained on piefed.social for 365 days.
The communities you have listed don't have a retention policy in the sidebar, so I don't believe this is the issue. Most likely it is due to federation not starting until a certain point.
I know that rimu was actively working on an archiving feature for piefed, but I think this feature isn't live yet. The archiving would basically "archive" old posts in object storage instead of deleting them. So, if somebody does try to load up an old post, it might take a hair longer to load as it is unarchived, but it wouldn't be deleted and inaccessible.
As for automatic deletion of older posts...this is something that a piefed admin can do on a community by community basis. When it is turned on for a community, that retention policy is listed in the community sidebar. For instance, if you look at the sidebar of !anime@ani.social, you will see that posts are retained on piefed.social for 365 days.
Okay then it's fine. I was afraid it was a compulsory thing. I wouldn't consider importing my Lemmy communities on Piefed if it forgot old post.
Pulling in those 50 posts works most of the time but sometimes, for unknown reasons, it fails and only some posts get mirrored.
Okay. Well I was just curious. I suppose all the posts will show up after I migrate the communities over here.
Thanks!
the posts will show up after I migrate the communities over here
Community migration doesn't backfill like this. Instead, it simply reassigns all the posts that the instance has in the old community to the newly migrated community. So, if there are important posts/comments that aren't federated over yet, you should force that federation before going through the migration.
To force federation of a post/comment in piefed, go to the community on its home instance and locate the post/comment that you want to bring into piefed. Copy the canonical link from that post comment. This is the link that the little fediverse icon points to (it's a little version of this logo):
Then, go over to the community on piefed, and near the bottom of the sidebar, there is a link to "Retrieve a post from the original server". Click that and paste in that canonical link you grabbed. Piefed should go out and pull over the post/comment that the link points to. One thing to note is that you can't pull a comment that is a reply to another comment without first pulling what it is in reply to.
Wow thanks. It's less obvious than the Youtube video makes it out to be.
Your comment should be stickied somewhere.
EDIT: I'm retrieving posts from the original SDF community one by one (good thing it's a small community with low bandwidth 🙂) and I notice that, while the posts appear, the original downvotes/upvotes aren't. copied over. I don't really care, but I figured I'd mention it.
while the posts appear, the original downvotes/upvotes aren't
This is a limitation of the api and is also what happens when force-federating content from lemmy to lemmy instances as well. TBH, including all the vote information for each post/comment is probably overkill and would bloat the api responses a lot.
When you are using an app/frontend to browse lemmy/piefed, the vote totals are displayed, that is simple enough. However, on the backend, each vote has a bunch of information attached to it like user/instance/timestamp/etc. All that information is not included when force-federating content, thus the lack of votes after being federated over.
Well, the overall score was reflected on those original posts piefed.social mirrored by itself. So it did work at least once. It's those extra posts I forced Piefed to retrieve manually that all came with the default score of 1.
Like I said, it doesn't really matter. But ideally when I finally decide to relocate the communities, I'd like the Piefed copies to be identical. But the scoring is not important: what I really care about is the content and that made it across, now that I finished the retrieve job manually. So it's all good.
Then, go over to the community on piefed, and near the bottom of the sidebar, there is a link to "Retrieve a post from the original server".
Some posts seem to not be retrievable, yet they exist when you follow the canonical links and the Lemmy instances aren't blocvked.
This one for instance:
Any idea why?
It's mostly based on when the first PieFed user joins. But when they join PieFed attempts to mirror the last 50 posts in that community and if it's a quiet community some of those posts will be very old.
Pulling in those 50 posts works most of the time but sometimes, for unknown reasons, it fails and only some posts get mirrored.
Israelis rally for end to Gaza war and release of captives
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/34825184
By MEE staff
Published date: 17 August 2025 11:52 BST
Israeli police arrested at least 22 protesters on Sunday as nationwide demonstrations and strikes called for an end to the war in Gaza and the release of captives.Demonstrators blocked several roads in Tel Aviv, including the highway connecting the city with Jerusalem. Activists set tyres on fire and caused traffic jams, while protest organisers and the main campaign group representing the families of captives called for a general strike on Sunday.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum said in a statement that protesters would "shut down the country today [Sunday] with one clear call: Bring back the 50 hostages, end the war".
Israelis rally for end to Gaza war and release of captives
By MEE staff
Published date: 17 August 2025 11:52 BSTIsraeli police arrested at least 22 protesters on Sunday as nationwide demonstrations and strikes called for an end to the war in Gaza and the release of captives.Demonstrators blocked several roads in Tel Aviv, including the highway connecting the city with Jerusalem. Activists set tyres on fire and caused traffic jams, while protest organisers and the main campaign group representing the families of captives called for a general strike on Sunday.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum said in a statement that protesters would "shut down the country today [Sunday] with one clear call: Bring back the 50 hostages, end the war".
Russia orders state-backed MAX messenger app, a WhatsApp rival, pre-installed on phones and tablets
- 'National messenger' to be pre-installed on devices
- New app is being integrated with government services
- Critics say it's a spy app, state media deny that
- WhatsApp and Telegram are under regulatory pressure
MOSCOW, Aug 21 (Reuters) - A Russian state-backed messenger application called MAX, a rival to WhatsApp that critics say could be used to track users, must be pre-installed on all mobile phones and tablets from next month, the Russian government said on Thursday.
The decision to promote MAX comes as Moscow is seeking greater control over the internet space as it is locked in a standoff with the West over Ukraine, which it casts as part of an attempt to shape a new world order.
It will also be mandatory that from September 1, Russia's domestic app store, RuStore, which is pre-installed on all Android devices, will be pre-installed on Apple devices.
A Russian-language TV app called LIME HD TV, which allows people to watch state TV channels for free, will be pre-installed on all smart TVs sold in Russia from January 1, the government added.
The push to promote homegrown apps comes after Russia said this month it had started restricting some calls on WhatsApp, owned by Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab, and on Telegram, accusing the foreign-owned platforms of failing to share information with law enforcement in fraud and terrorism cases.
There have been jokes about potential establishment of Russian version of Kwangmyong years ago, maybe even decades, called "Cheburnet" (after Cheburashka - Soviet stop-motion cartoon character), and it seems like they're actually pretty close to finally sealing off from outer world.
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Tens of thousands of protesters gather in Tel Aviv to demand end to Gaza war
Tens of thousands of demonstrators have gathered in Tel Aviv to call for an end to the war in Gaza and the release of hostages, one of the largest demonstrations in Israel since the start of the fighting in October 2023.
The rally on Sunday evening was the culmination of a day of nationwide protests and a general strike to pressure the government to halt the military campaign. “Bring them all home! Stop the war!” shouted the vast crowd, which had converged on the so-called Hostage Square in Tel Aviv plaza – a focal point for protesters throughout the war.
Hundreds of thousands of protesters gather in Tel Aviv to demand end to Gaza war
One of largest rallies in Israel since start of conflict follows general strike to press government to stop military actionGuardian staff reporter (The Guardian)
The Techlords and Their Ideology Are Mortal Enemies of Humanity
The Techlords and Their Ideology Are Mortal Enemies of Humanity
The techlords intend to bring humanity to the brink of collapse and then, in a magic trick, rise to power, saving the species or themselves as the last specimens.joao-camargo (Common Dreams)
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Trump, With Tariffs and Threats, Tries to Strong-Arm Nations to Retreat on Climate Goals
The president has made no secret of his distaste for wind and solar in America. Now he’s taking his fossil fuel agenda overseas.
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Drugmakers Hail Early Wins in AI-Driven Transformation of Manufacturing
Drugmakers Hail Early Wins in AI-Driven Transformation of Manufacturing
Companies have claimed improvements to yield, batch consistency and output while acknowledging the risks and challenges created by the technology.Nick Paul Taylor (BioSpace)
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Drugmakers Hail Early Wins in AI-Driven Transformation of Manufacturing
Drugmakers Hail Early Wins in AI-Driven Transformation of Manufacturing
Companies have claimed improvements to yield, batch consistency and output while acknowledging the risks and challenges created by the technology.Nick Paul Taylor (BioSpace)
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Buchenwald can refuse entry to people wearing Palestinian keffiyeh, German court rules
A German court has ruled that a Nazi concentration camp memorial has the right to refuse entry to those wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh scarf.
The higher administrative court in the eastern state of Thuringia on Wednesday rejected a request from a woman to be allowed entry to the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial while wearing a keffiyeh.
“It is unquestionable that this would endanger the sense of security of many Jews, especially at this site,” the court said.
Buchenwald can refuse entry to people wearing Palestinian keffiyeh, German court rules
Court in Thuringia rejected woman’s request to enter concentration camp memorial while wearing the scarfGuardian staff reporter (The Guardian)
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Puts on the genocidology hat
"You see they are not killing using organized industrial means, so it can't be a genocide. If the killing is done by randomly shooting and bombing civilians it's just a sparkling massacre"
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"Germany supports genocide because they feel guilty about doing genocide"
...
Nobody supporting Israel has any guilt towards the Holocaust. This is the most contradictory statement one can make.
Germany supports white people ethnically cleansing the Middle East of brown people. For more context
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
So the guilt part comes in the idea that because Germans perpetuated the worst historical genocide against the Jewish people, they therefore will now bend over backwards to support the Jewish people.
This has similarities with "white guilt" elsewhere, such as in the US with black and native populations. It's usually used as a smear against white activists in favor of BLM, or against the Dakota Access pipeline, or other such cases.
There are alternative explanations that aren't so adjacent to the arguments people are using to derail valid protest movements.
No one plays the victim better than the Israelis
Well, a close second are Scousers and Hillsborough
The director of the memorial personally said, that people wearing a Kufiyeh are not generally banned, but can be banned because of it. The headline/article is just misleading and sensationalism.
The person suing the memorial had repeatedly tried to use the memorial site for their orthodox communist propaganda and already got banned from it for that.
Where did you get this info? The article mention none of that
The director of the memorial personally said, that people wearing a Kufiyeh are not generally banned, but can be banned because of it. The headline/article is just misleading and sensationalism.
Nice excuse from him after the internal document was leaked Israel lover using the same tactic when they got exposed
intentionally making it look like the bad Germans are banning Palestinians
Nobody is claiming Germans are all bad and support Israeli terrorism just the government
Translate it yourself.
kommunistische-organisation.de…
The organization is notorious for being dogmatic, authoritarian communists that in the past praised the Hamas as legitimate "resistance" and interrupted events at the Buchenwald memorial.
https://x.com/leonmwalter/status/1513154520028692493
Kufiya hat in Buchenwald Hausverbot! – Kommunistische Organisation
Heute wurde in Buchenwald wegen des Tragens einer Kufiya ein Hausverbot erteilt. Der Hinweis auf die deutsche Beteiligung am Völkermord in Gaza wird damit vom Gelände der Gedenkstätte polizeilich verbannt. Wir prüfen juristische Schritte.ko (Kommunistische Organisation)
There is zero proof that the woman who was blocked from entering the memorial had any connection to the organization . Seem like the organization you mentioned used that event to spread their antisemitism. The memorial employers also help their case by associating kufiyah as antisemitism and trying to conflate antizionism with antisemitism. The kufiyah was never an anti jew slogan it's a symbol of the inherit right of any group of people to living freely. It is even recognized by UNESCO
I should also remember you that in Buchenwald concentration that 11000 jews was massacred but also 45000 non jew . So who those memorial staffs are to say the Palestinians getting genocide and people who oppose this genocide to use this memorial as an occasion to say massacres and genocides should never happen again no matter who is the victim This is an humanitarian and moral statement not a political one
I also wonder why no organization associated with settlers terrorists in the west bank oppressing Palestinians are in Germany terrorist list
Funny that you use "communist" as an accusation in the context of Buchenwald:
From 1937 to 1945, the Nazis imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people here in the Buchenwald concentration camp, including political opponents, communists, homosexuals, foreign prisoners, Jews, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah's Witnesses and undesired clergy.
(source)
Based on this list, communists get exactly as much right to the space as all the other groups.
Buchenwald: A warning against the dangers of extremism
Buchenwald, one of the largest Nazi concentration camps on German soil, was liberated 80 years ago on April 11, 1945. What role can remembrance of the Holocaust play amid the current resurgence of far-right extremism?Christoph Strack (Deutsche Welle)
It's "funny" how that's the thing you care about and not the actual point of my comment, that those people - communists or not - praise the massacre of October 7th. I feel like their "right" to the place expires by that.
I was poking you specifically on the "Communist" part because I saw you bring it up elsewhere in the conversation. I don't adopt this organization's political analysis of the October 7th attacks.
Now, let's talk about the "right" to the place. The Nazis murdered homosexuals in Buchenwald. Does a member of a homophobic Jewish organization get the right to visit with symbols of their organization?
Regardless of anything else you might think, you just have to admit that this rationale is bullshit:
“It is unquestionable that this would endanger the sense of security of many Jews, especially at this site,” the court said.
It is not unquestionable that wearing a keffiyeh would endanger anyone's sense of security.
Argue about anything else, but you cannot actually defend that "it is unquestionable".
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India and China to Explore Border Demarcation Amid US Tensions
cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/46814877
archive.is/MB3XX
China, India Take Steps to Mark Border in Major Reset of Ties
India and China have agreed to explore demarcating their disputed border, a key move toward resolving decades-old territorial disputes as the neighbors look to recalibrate ties against the backdrop of strained India-US relations.Bloomberg
Kenya in talks with China to convert dollar rail loan into yuan
cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/46814543
Kenya is in talks with China to convert a dollar-denominated railway loan into Chinese yuan, an aide to the Finance Minister John Mbadi told Reuters on Wednesday.
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Presidential Portrait
New C.D.C. Director Resists Ouster as Other Officials Resign
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is said to have demanded that the director, Susan Monarez, either quit or be fired. Her lawyers say she won’t resign.
Democrats are rightly calling for Kennedy's removal:
I had serious doubts about CDC Director Monarez’s willingness to stand up against RFK Jr.’s personal mission to destroy public health in America—I’m glad that I was wrong.If there are any adults left in the White House: we cannot let RFK Jr. burn what's left of CDC. FIRE HIM.
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Democrats will pay for ignoring base’s qualms about Gaza
Democrats will pay for ignoring base’s qualms about Gaza
As the Democratic Party searches for direction in the post-2024 landscape, its leaders seem bent on alienating their own base over Gaza.contact@ifamericansknew.org (Israel Palestine News)
Trump administration sanctions Canadian judge who sits on International Criminal Court
From left to right: International Criminal Court Judge Nicolas Guillou of France; deputy prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan of Fiji; deputy prosecutor Mame Mandiaye Niang of Senegal; and Judge Kimberly Prost of Canada are shown in this composite photo. All four have been sanctioned by the United States.
[...]
ICC jurists Nicolas Guillou of France, Nazhat Shameem Khan of Fiji and Mame Mandiaye Niang of Senegal were also sanctioned, with the State Department linking the decision to the tribunal's investigation into Israel's actions in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. As a result of the sanctions, any assets they hold in U.S. jurisdictions are frozen.The court said on Wednesday that it deplored the sanctions, calling them "a flagrant attack against the independence of an impartial judicial institution which operates under the mandate from 125 [countries] from all regions.
"They constitute also an affront against [these countries], the rules-based international order and, above all, millions of innocent victims across the world," the statement continued. "The ICC will continue fulfilling its mandates, undeterred, in strict accordance with its legal framework as adopted by the States Parties and without regard to any restriction, pressure or threat."
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Shitty Yanks that don't acknowledge the court to begin with have no business telling them what they can't do.
I hate this world.
When it comes to topic lists / multi-communities, how will Lemmy and Piefed differ?
I haven't been following the development in that area, are there more recent updates from this pull?
github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull…
Implement multi-community (fixes #818, fixes #5340) by Nutomic · Pull Request #5601 · LemmyNet/lemmy
Database migrations Api endpoints Parameters and query changes for PostView, to browse posts in multicommunity (blocked by Remove rest of page limit #5429) Federation (see Piefed FEP) Piefed im...GitHub
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Computer Science, a popular college major, has one of the highest unemployment rates
A Popular College Major Has One of The Highest Unemployment Rates
"Every kid with a laptop thinks they're the next Zuckerberg, but most can't debug their way out of a paper bag," one expert told Newsweek.Suzanne Blake (Newsweek)
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The major saw an unemployment rate of 6.1 percent, just under those top majors like physics and anthropology, which had rates of 7.8 and 9.4 percent respectively.
The numbers aren't too high although it shows the market is no longer starved for grads.
It's important to understand that this is a standard feature of the capitalist economy where the market is used to determine how many people are needed in a certain field at a point in time. It is not unusual that there's no overarching plan for how many software engineers would be needed over the long term. The market has to go through a shortage phase, creating the effects in wages, unemployment, educational institutions and so on, in order to increase the production of software engineers. Then the market has to go through the oversupply phase creating the opposite effects on wages, unemployment and educational institutions in order to decrease the production of software engineers. The people who are affected by these swings are a necessary part of the ability for the market to compute the next state of this part of the economy. This is how it works. It uses real people and resources to do it. The less planning we do, the more people and resources have to go through the meat grinder in order to decide where the economy goes next. We don't have to do it this way but that's how it's been decided for a while now.
I was doing my CS degree immediately after the 2008 meltdown. At the time there was a massive oversupply of finance people who graduated and couldn't find work. This continued for years. I was always shocked at the time why the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes so that kids and their parents don't end up spending boatloads of money and lives in degrees under false promises of prosperity. I didn't have an answer then and people around me couldn't explain it either but many were asking the same question. I wish someone understood it the way I do now.
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This should be common knowledge. I recall in the 1990s there was a huge push for truck drivers. Everywhere you went "Be a truck driver! Own your own business! Make six figures!" And only a decade later, employed drivers struggle to make ends meet.
If you see a huge push for a particular job - you better plan your exit.
the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes
They kinda do, but only the part where they increase program sizes after demand exists and only wind down when the market is saturated. They can't really work too far ahead if they don't know ow something will be in demand and they don't want to tell students to not do something they offer just because there are too many graduates. Add the four or five years to graduation and you get a system that lags behind reality even if the planning was better.
But a well designed post secondary education means graduates can go into similar or related fields, they aren't limited to what is on their diploma except in their own minds.
I was always shocked at the time why the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes so that kids and their parents don't end up spending boatloads of money and lives in degrees under false promises of prosperity.
bls.gov/ooh/ does track this a bit, but I don’t know if universities use the info or if the site is intended for individuals instead.
Home
The Occupational Outlook Handbook is the government's premier source of career guidance featuring hundreds of occupations—such as carpenters, teachers, and veterinarians.Bureau of Labor Statistics
I was always shocked at the time why the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes so that kids and their parents don't end up spending boatloads of money and lives in degrees under false promises of prosperity. I didn't have an answer then and people around me couldn't explain it either but many were asking the same question.
You are looking at Universities^0 all wrong. Predicting the markets are not their job or role in society.
The primary purpose of a University is research. That research output comes from three primary sources: the faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Naturally undergrads don’t tend to come into the University knowing how to do proper research, so there is a teaching component involved to bring them up to the necessary standards so they can contribute to research — but ultimately, that’s what they exist for.
What a University is not is a job training centre. That’s not its purpose, nor should it be. A University education is the gold standard in our society so many corporations and individuals will either prefer or require University training in exchange for employment — but that’s not the Universities that are enforcing that requirement. That’s all on private enterprise to decide what they want. All the University ultimately cares about is research output.
Hence, if there is valuable research output to be made (and inputs in the form of grants) in the field of “Philosophy of Digital Thanatology” (yes, I’m making that up!), and they have access to faculty to lead suitable research AND they have students that want to study it, they’ll run it as a programme. It makes no difference whether or not there is any industry demand for “ Philosophy of Digital Thanatology” — if it results in grants and attracts researchers and students, a University could decide to offer it as a degree programme.
We have a LOT of degree programmes with more graduates than jobs available. Personally, I’m glad for that. If I have some great interest in a subject, why shouldn’t I be allowed to study it? Why should I be forced to take it if and only if there is industry demand for that field? If that were the case, we’d have nearly no English language or Philosophy students — and likely a lot fewer Math and Theoretical Physics students as well. But that’s not the point of a University. It never has been, and it never should be.
I’ve been an undergraduate, a graduate, and a University instructor in Computer Science. I’ve seen some argue in the past that the faculty should teach XYZ because it’s what industry needs at a given moment — but that’s not its purpose or its role. If industry needs a specific skill, it either needs to teach it itself, or rely on more practical community colleges and apprenticeship programmes which are designed around training for work.
[0] — I’m going to use the Canadian terminology here, which differentiates between “Universities” and “Colleges”, with the former being centres of research education that grant degrees and the latter referring to schools that are often primarily trade and skill focussed that offer more diploma programmes. American common parlance tends to throw all of the above into the bucket of “College” in one way or another which makes differentiating between them more complicated.
Speaking for the US, major universities may be there for research, but they are a small portion of the mass of schools across the country.
People have mostly been getting degrees to get a good job since at least shortly after WW2. It’s silly to pretend people are going massively in debt without the expectation of a return on that investment.
Nothing against people learning for the joy of learning, but I absolutely hold schools accountable for not making job prospects clear when most of the students are both young and ignorant of the world.
they don't want to scare people away form an impacted majors, they probably lose money if they arnt butts in the seat, if people arnt willing to pay for a major with no jobs the uni lose money and they probably have to shut that program down. it seems state uni around here on care about putting as much butts in seats of undergrads as possible so they can have thier cash cow, they dont care what happens to those 3-4years in, just push them through like they are in high school.
biotech is another one i bring up on other forums, its one of those it looks likes in demand, but they really arnt keen on hiring people. its gatekeeped at the scientist level, unless a student is aware that labs exists in thier universities they are out of luck. and state unis here do a good job of not telling or hiding the labs under an obscure category. Professors are very reluctant to even talk about thier labs at all; some have an ego issue(they dont want students to ruin thier reputation, eventhough we arnt even a threat thier field, as we arnt in grad school, i had a professor like this) and labs are usually filled up, so theres very little chance to get into lab if your lucky. CCs dont have labs. that is the part that universities dont warn students about, if you had labs in your unis all this time, isnt ir prudent to look for these labs, although i suspect they dont want the PIs to get inundated with students requesting to get into thier labs, thats why they are very hush hush about it.
i also think bio unemployment is skewed towards health too, because a significant amount of them are held by women, who are likely to be employed in the field over men, first its likely they are going into NURSING, dieticians, PHYSICAL therapy where all the jobs are, plus CLS which is a niche grad job. on the research side its the same for women ive only seen a majority are in the labs volunteering(apparently at my uni some of them only wanted women because lab manager/PI was being a creep), otherwise the biotech side have a pretty large unemployment, but its lumped in with all bio majors.
What you describe might be true for Canada, but it doesn't apply to all universities. Many universities have two primary tasks: research and education. These are two separate tasks with overlap.
I do find it understandable if publicly funded universities place restrictions on how many students they accept per program as it's their duty to give back go society.
So coding trade schools need to be created.
It's not honestly a job more complex than many trades. Treating it as different is a relict from the time when most programmers came from backgrounds in some cutting edge defense research or fundamental science. And honestly not all of them did, some learned it as a trade when it was a new thing, and advanced is like a trade, and themselves treated it like a trade, and wrote books about it like about a trade. Unfortunately later there was that hype over tech and Silicon Valley and crap.
Today's programmers sometimes have problems with deep enough understanding of algorithms and data structures they use, while this is about similar in complexity to the knowledge an electrician possesses.
In USSR there was a program of "programming being the second literacy", with Pascal and C being studied in schools and schools getting computers (probably the most expensive things in there), PDP-11 clones looking like PCs, and a few other kinds of machines. Unfortunately, the USSR itself was on the path to collapse. Honestly if only it existed for a bit longer, and reformed and liberalized more gently, maybe that program would have brought fruit (I mean, it did, just for other countries where people would emigrate).
BTW, Soviet trade schools ("primary technical school" that was called) prepared programmers among other things. University degrees related to cybernetics were more about architecture of mass service systems, of program systems, of production lines, industrial optimization, - all things that people deciding on those learning programs could imagine as being useful. Writing code wasn't considered that important. And honestly that was right, except the Internet blew up, and with it - the completely unregulated and scams and bubbles driven tech industry.
Honestly the longer I live, the more nostalgic I become for that country which failed 5 years before I was born. Yeah, people remembering it also remember that feeling of "we can live like this no longer", and that nothing was real or functional, but perhaps they misjudged and didn't see the parts which were real and functional, treating them as given. It was indeed a catastrophe, not a liberation.
An electrician's work or a plumber's work are also complex. Or carpenter's.
Come on. This is not about complex theory being used, this is about messed up instruments, where layers upon layers of bullshit are laid to deliver upon hype.
People writing compilers and operating systems and cryptography libraries are those who need real education. People who make websites or Android apps on the framework of the day - need knowledge that is a thing in itself with no fundamental value.
Coding trade schools effectively exist already — diploma granting Community Colleges exist for this reason. Here’s one, for example.
But that’s not a University. We shouldn’t change the role of a University to match that of a diploma-awarding Community College. Challenging employers to see such students as being as useful hires compared to a University educated developer is likely a different story, however.
Information and Computer Systems Technologist, Diploma
Start in September or January The Information and Computer Systems program prepares you for work locally and globally in database design and management, network software design, administration, and operations and maintenance of networks and software.Camosun College
There's a lot of jobs in the private and public sector for people with anthropology degrees. In the US, anthropology is taught as a four field approach encompassing Biological Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology, and Archaeology.
Each of the subfields have different levels of hireability based on a bachelor's degree.
I personally only have a bachelor's and live well. I have a home and live comfortably. But, to your point, I have essentially capped out my earnings. I can't make more without obtaining a graduate degree.
Depends on the subfield. Archaeology is in high demand due to historic preservation laws.
But yeah capping out is annoying, but also common in a lot of fields.
It’s also just a general pattern that when a skill is in high demand, the jobs pay great. Everyone wants great pay, so the flood the schools to acquire that skill. Eventually things reach a saturation point.
And also there are always charlatan programs that take your money to hand out worthless certifications. As time goes by, these “educations” mean less and less, a lot of people just nab them online because they want to make better money fast, and there are fewer and fewer real jobs unfilled. Until we arrive at a point like this.
It’s a supply and demand issue.
The way college works is a scam in itself. You don't need that much liberal art education. Four years and tens of thousands of dollars (sometimes hundreds of thousands) just to see if you can hack it in a job in your field? That's insane.
Most jobs should be accessible right after high school in the form of paid internships. Programming is a trade, and most of the skills should be taught in high school. Not everyone needs to be a "computer scientist", just like not every plumber needs to be a hydraulic engineer.
I've worked in a lot of programming jobs and zero of the people were what I would have called computer scientists. They were just coders who could write a conditional statement and a for loop. That gets the job done 99% of the time. (Obviously I'm greatly oversimplifying. My point is there's no "computer science" involved.)
After a job in programming for a couple years, if you want to start working on the Linux kernel and write compilers, go ahead and go to school then and become a computer scientist. That's so few people.
And then when there are no jobs hiring internships and computer science, you know not to focus on that. Do something else.
But big business hates this. They want everyone to prove in a gauntlet that you can work under super high pressure and tight deadlines that are totally arbitrary.
In the 1970s companies started "Stack Ranking" all their employees and firing the bottom 10% in order to replace them or simply using their wages to pay CEOs more.
Companies used to provide workers a pay related sense of justice, a career for life.
Now the media will jump past all this to blame anything but the CEOs and failure of Government to reign in the wage gap via the force of law.
Companies used to provide workers a pay related sense of justice, a career for life.
.... There was a period from the 1940s to the 1970s when this was more common-place. But historically this kind of cut-throat wage squeeze was very normal, particularly in the industrialized American north.
One of the driving forces behind improvements in the American capitalist model, wrt pensions and professional job security and a regulated relationship between business and labor, was European Communism. The allure of the revolutionary communist reconstructions (and less revolutionary socialist rebuilds) drove some significant number of Western professionals into the waiting arms of Papa Stalin and a fair number more into large labor unions and socialist political ideologies.
Without the USSR as foil to the capitalist system, there is less urgency among the capitalist class to negotiate with labor and less optimism among American workers to achieve some kind of superior economic position.
That, combined with an absolute tsunami of corporate propaganda to brainwash civilian workers, a swelling pustule of a police state to cow the lumpen proletariat, and a Global War on Whatever to galvanize young liberals and conservatives alike against the phantom menace of foreign invasion, has supplanted any kind of negotiating between capital owners and their wage cuck workers.
The only thing you have to hope for in the modern day is a big enough 401k such that you can live like a parasite rather than the host.
I graduated with a degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering from the University of Washington in 2020, during the height of Covid.
After over 3000 handcrafted applications (and many more AI-written ones), I have never been offered a job in the field.
I know of multiple CS graduates who have killed themselves, and so many who are living with their parents and working service/retail.
I think the software engineering rush of the early 2000s will be looked back upon like the San Francisco gold rush in 1949.
I was in a similar boat. Graduated right around the housing crash. If my wife didnt work at the time, we would have been in a terrible spot. It look a good 6 months to get my first job. After that, I haven't had any issues popping into jobs.
Sounds like you got a raw deal. Our industry has many highs and lows when it comes to jobs and work available.
It sounds like the same amount of effort that it would take to make a really good open source project, or contribute to an existing one.
I find it hard to believe you wouldn't get a job with something like that under your belt. Also 3000 applications is probably a bit shotgun rather than targeted and HR would be able to pick up on it
You're right that my time was wasted, and knowing the outcome, I wish I could go back and do more project work before trying to enter the job market.
But I don't think that is a financial possibility for most Americans. Going to school drained my savings, when I graduated I had almost nothing except for school debt, medical debt, and high rent. Saying "I'm gonna take off and work for free for a year" never really seemed like a possibility.
And as for my apps, the 3000 were not shotgun, they were all personalized, custom cover letters, keywords, etc. It only averaged out to 3/day. I did not track the apps where I used AI to submit them- the AI ones were definitely shotgun.
It's not your fault, but it sounds like you and probably a lot of other people were misled about what having a degree actually does.
The most important thing someone looks at when you apply for a job is that you are interested in the thing and capable of doing it. The degree doesn't really do that but the personal projects do. The degree might be a nice to have on top and helps to convince some people, but you always end up working with people without one anyway.
I'm not sure I was misled, what you said was explicitly taught to us at University. I think my degree is the #1 thing on my resume, but of course I also had projects, a few certificates, and multiple attempts at more specific fields.
Back when I was applying, my GitHub activity was pretty solid green.
It's weird because everywhere I've ever worked routinely hires people who don't even know how to make a commit, or anything at all really.
For some reason even those people are somehow jumping ahead of competent people like you in the queue. It's also annoying for us because we have to deal with the bad ones that HR delivers.
Yeah there are obviously unfortunate cases. But to put another unsourced number out there I would say 90% of open source maintainers are employed in some way or even directly to work on that thing.
The point of bringing it up is that those people would gladly give a pass on an interview to someone they already know contributes than some random graduate they don't know.
Yeah. Broken economy, broken world, etc etc. it's like a bad dream that won't end. IRL is the doomscroll now.
I don't blame you, just be thankful you're so out of touch you find it hard to believe.
Well to see it from the perspective from the inside: we always have hundreds of openings, and I've seen openings for months and years without suitable candidates. Sometimes lots of bad applicants and sometimes no applicants at all.
That's for the niche openings. For regular graduate stuff new people start every single day.
It's hard to match up that with the fact that some people apparently aren't getting a single application progressed.
the 2020-23 isnt exactly a time they were hiring at all, they froze for like 2 years. and students were barely learning at all since the classes were all online, and there was no way to find volunteering work. if you go back to look at your university reviews on yelp(yea they have it for universities) its pretty dismal out there.
he said he handcrafted alot of them, so it was pretty targeted.
I have twenty years experience and it took me 300+ applications to get my current job.
Times are changing.
No I have a spreadsheet with 3200 lines of submitted applications, which includes both entry level positions and internships. Many with customized cover letters.
When you do the math its not even a strong pace, only about 3/day over 3 years. On a good day I was submitting 12-15.
I even applied to some famous ones, like the time Microsoft opened up 30 entry level positions and received 100,000 applications in 24 hours. It is rumored thet they realized they cannot process 100k apps, so they threw them all away and hired internally.
Whether they actually threw them out or not, that one always sticks with me. Submitting 100k apps is literally a lifetime of human work. All of that wasted effort is a form of social murder in my opinion.
Lol well I guess it's easy to get confused. I was submitting job applications to write computer applications.
I was submitting app apps.
...the San Francisco gold rush in 1949.
Classic CS major, making an off-by-one(hundred years) error ;)
I fled from the Midwest because there were no good jobs outside of the oil and gas industry, and ended up in the Seattle area. Saving up and moving cost 2 years of my life, Im not sure I could do it again.
...and I did apply to some jobs on the west coast, although most of my apps were around Seattle.
But please tell me, where should I have went instead of Seattle?
Over the years I have tried a handful of subfields.
I always felt particularly adept at assembly language programming, so I had a couple projects doing that, and applied to every relevent job I could find.
As a math nerd I enjoyed data science and machine learning, I had quite a few projects like a neutral network from scratch in Matlab, and many data analysis and computer vision projects in R. I was always aware this field is very competitive and my chances were low here.
I had a friend get a job in the biomedical field, so I tried to follow that, I have Python projects doing basic gene sequencing and analysis, even a really cool project that replicated evolution.
Another friend landed a government job, so I followed his advice and got some security certs.
I also had smaller projects and attempts at databases, finance programming, and video games.
2020s was probably the worst time to graduate or even attend a 4-year university. they were starting to lock down, and they were laying people off and hiring freezing everywhere, that dint stop till maybe mid 2022, the effect was pretty devasting, i was still working a chain store and many people from IT to electrical engineer just got freshly laid off. and then the '23 massive tech layoffs began too i dont see this going to reverse for CS majors anythime soon, since CS has been having issues like since early 2010s of getting hired.
on students who were attending universities for the first time, or halfway through thier degree in the 2020s, i looked at reviews of my universities, most of them said they dint learn anything at all, so it puts them at disadvantage already, especially if its all only ONLINE courses. if you been in a regular course where the professors only uses powerpoint , you arnt learning anything a professor did this with BIOchem(for life science students, which is allegedly easier than the other biochem for scientists) and then when exam times came, they were almost as tough as my CC chem classes.
There was even a class action suit against UW for their negligence during covid. I guess the case is already settled, so I'm looking forward to my meager restitution check.
And I actually feel lucky that most of my serious classes were complete before Covid lockdown, bc the quality of education during covid was absolutely pathetic.
If anyone is interested in APL programming send me your resume.
Looking for good software engineers; curious folks.
APL, now thats something I havent heard about in a while.
Similar issues at work with COBOL. Sure I know it but im literally working to get everything out of it.
I actually do have apl printed Keycaps because they’re cool 😁
Given enough time most people develop a memory. There are different methods of entry, separate layers, backtick input, other macros.
You can try it here tryapl.org/
They have some shortcuts in lieu of a full keymap.
Oh that's cool. That's one of those languages I saw myself working in when I was younger - it's a powerful language for mathematical stuff, and not terribly difficult.
Felt more like creating circuitry to do software stuff rather than programming.
The industry went to shit after non-nerdy people found out there could be a lot of money in tech.
I started my undergrad in the early 90’s, and ran into multiple students who had never even used a computer, but had heard from someone that there was a lot of money to be made in computers so they decided to make that their major.
Mind you, those students tended not to do terribly well and often changed major after the first two years — but this phenomenon certainly isn’t anything particularly new. Having been both a student and a University instructor (teaching primarily 3rd and 4th year Comp.Sci subjects) I’ve seen this over and over and over again.
By way of advice to any new or upcoming graduates who may be reading this from an old guy who has been around for a long time, used to be a University instructor, and is currently a development manager for a big software company — if you’re looking to get a leg-up on your competition while you look for work, start or contribute to an Open Source project that you are passionate about. Create software you love purely for the love of creating software.
It’s got my foot in the door for several jobs I’ve had — both directly (i.e.: “we want to use your software and are hiring you to help us integrate it as our expert”; IBM even once offered a re-badged version to their customers) and indirectly (one Director I worked under once told me the reason they hired me was because of my knowledge and passion talking about my OSS project). And now as a manager who has to do hiring myself it’s also something that I look for in candidates (mind you, I also look for people who use Linux at home — we use a LOT of Linux in our cloud environments, and one of my easiest filters is to take out candidates who show no curiosity or interest in software outside whatever came installed on their PC or what they had to work with at school).
My own experience (being probably around your age) is that "Software development being fashionable" and hence there being a subsequent oversupply of devs, comes in cycles, with the peaks being roughly coincident with Tech bubbles.
I remember that period in the mid and late 90s when being a software developer was actually seen as "a good career choice" as the industry was growing fast (with personal computers, then computing spreading into all sizes of companies and vusiness activities, then the Net bubble).
Then the bubble crashed and suddenly it wasn't fashionable anymore. The outsourcing wave made it fashionable again but in places like India, because they were serving not just their own IT needs but also a big slice of the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world's, so the demand-supply over there was so inballanced that being a software developer was enough for a good house with servants in places like Mumbai. (I actually managed a small team based in India back then and I remember how most were clearly people who had no natural skill at all for programming). At the same time in those countries which were outsourcing to places like India, programming wasn't a good career choice (mainly because it was the entry level stuff that got outsourced) but if you were senior back then demand had never been as high.
Then came a period of retrenchment of outsourcing because it wasn't that good at delivering robust software that does what the business needs it to do (the mix of mediocre business requirements and development teams which are in fact not even it the same company means that deliverables invariably don't do what the business needs them to do and the back-and-forth cycles needed to get it there take more time than it would if everything was in-house) and a new Tech bubble, so software development became fashionable again and once again people who would otherwise not consider it, were choosing it as a career.
I think that what we're seeing now is the initial effects of the crash of the latest Tech bubble: the Stock Market might still be ridding its own momentum, but the actual people "at the coalface" are already reducing costs, plus the AI fad is hitting entry level positions like the outsourcing fad did, and probably it too will fade because AI "coding" has its own set of problems which will emerge as companies get more of that code and try and take it through a full production life-cycle.
As for how you chose devs, I would say it's really just anchored on the eternal rule that "toolmakers make much better devs than tool users" - in my experience gifted devs tend be the ones who "solve their own problems" and for a dev that often means coding coming up with their own tool for it, either as a whole or as part of an existing open source project.
I’m going to amend your timeline slightly, but only to note that Y2K masked what likely would have been a bit of a slump in the late 90s. Hiring around Y2K was crazy — but once the crisis date passed (with little fanfare due to the tremendous amount of work and money poured into remedying the issue), we definitely hit a slump as many of those extra hires weren’t really needed in a post-Y2K world.
…at least until we get to Y2K+38 in a few years. And maybe Y2K+40 two years after that 😛
This.
At my jobs, AI is just scratching the surface. But they're slowly implementing entire coding bot swarms, so a Product person can report a bug, it gets reviewed by an agent, assessed by an agent, fixed by an agent, and tested by another agent - then PR'd for a dev to review.
This hurts the junior level.
When you like your profession, your job you still do for money. Otherwise you'd be playing with similar things at home to much more satisfaction.
So here I won't agree and say that tech needs unions. Union pressure would solve the problem of labor organization and on-job education, so that they wouldn't be shit at their jobs.
Skill and such things are practically important for scientists, maybe.
Shades of dotcom days. Everyone hopped on the bandwagon. Most lured by the high salaries and gold-rush mentality. Nowadays, just having a CS degree isn't enough. You want portfolio pieces to set you apart. Start by having a damn portfolio. You can set one up for free on GH Pages or CloudFlare. Or pay a few bucks and set one up on Wordpress. If you can't figure out how, that CS degree was wasted.
You want stories that show you bring value. Show that you can build things beyond school projects. Even if you do school projects, document them and push them out. Show why they're cool and what you can do. Throw up screenshots, diagrams, or animations. No walls of text.
Also, learn to sell yourself. Not in the oily LinkedIn way. Just be out there. Contribute back. Educate others and have a voice. Blog, newsletter, social media, book, or video channel. They're dead-easy to set up and free so there's no gatekeepers to go through, other than your ideas.
If in a big city, go to Meetups or demo days. Meet people and ASK WHAT THEY DO. Help connect them to others. Anyone just sitting there cranking out resumes is going to get filtered by the LLM screener. Might as well pin up your resume above the urinal at the pub.
Finally: everyone can low-code or vibecode. Those are table stakes now. You want to do better.
I'd love to hear your experience around this and what sector or jobs this assisted, because more data is great.
But in my experience across 25+ jobs ranging from startups to fortune 500/250/100...I have never encountered a hiring process that would care about this.
I would love to be proven wrong though.
We do look at GH history and activity - can't say, out of about 50 candidates in the past two months that I reviewed, have any meaningful activity on GH.
Not saying I am proving you wrong, but finding a candidate that has anything to show publicly is hard. Hell, even I, having a very well paying job, have much to show off publicly. I can, however, share my personal stuff. I've got tons of opened issues tho 🤣
Yeah, no. Once I saw this kind of bullshit was needed for programming jobs I just pivoted to IT and cybersec.
These days the pay is just as good, and chances to find a job are even better, the environment is much lower pressure and this gross techbro exploited/exploiting attitude that somehow programming is special and not just a modern day 9-5 factory job is non-existent. With dev jobs, the goal posts are ever shifting. No I'm not doing a portfolio, no I'm not doing your "take home assessment", no I'm not doing a live coding exercise for your £20k ass minimum wage job where "we measure work by effort, not time" and I'll somehow end up on call. I love programming, but not enough to let myself get fucked by corpos every which way.
You do have to deal with corpo boomers though, but if you're lucky they mostly realize they're just cogs that got lost and they better not make too much noise or they'll be let go.
I blame social media and this perverse need to display notifications instantly. Technically very interesting problem to work on, but basically useless to a customer.
We had a button for that, on demand - it was called F5
I remember that those were used for games like Travian (displaying time and resources), dynamic content (like blasting music on a webpage) and web chat (that's what I blame the most, because it was in demand).
Well, they didn't do that, but I can imagine another "standard and convenient" way could have been taken to add realtime notifications to a webpage - a set of tags for displaying messages of an IRC channel, sending a message to an IRC channel, and so on, with maybe associating actions (going to an URL? or maybe updating part of DOM, but without full agility of JS, just add/remove/replace tag by id) with events. Like refreshing a page on a message in the channel, but no more frequent than N seconds.
Combined with iframes (I'll admit I consider iframes a good thing, burn me at the stake), this could give you a pretty dynamic experience.
IRC is, of course, not secure, but maybe if such functionality were present and if it became popular, IRC over SSL would become normal earlier too.
Or maybe something like WS could have been standardized far earlier. For pushing events to client.
I agree about F5, but the effect of realtime changes was psychologically very strong.
I appreciate your perspective here. There is an element of whining and negativity among job-seekers lately. I've seen some people buckle down and hustle, and I've seen others give up in frustration. The truth of this is that there are going to be a lot of people who never even get to use their CS degrees, and there will be people who "win" and get jobs like this without one. It boils down to what you can do and whether or not a company in your area finds value in it.
It's not fair. It's just what we have to deal with.
Where I am and due to its greater practicality, nursing is more popular as a college course than compsci.
I once started as compsci, but instead got a job fixing PCs. Also self-learned basic carpentry and plumbing. Looking at raising livestock in the near future.
Nursing is huuuuge. My nurse friend with a doctorate just landed a $250k base job with 10 weeks paid vacation and a slew of other benefits. Wild.
Plumbing is huge too. If I ever need one, they're booked out like 3+ months unless you want to pay an emergency fee which is like double or triple.
I, too, am raising some livestock. We'll see where it goes. But at least to me it feels more connected and real.
HERE AS well, nursing is popular because you can make bank as a travelling NURSE, over being staffed a hospital. im guessing thats what a guy i met as aco-worker in retail once mentioned, i thought he was kidding at first.
only if you have the personality, and tolerates belligerent patients, or work with human waste products from time to time. i suspect the nursing shortages you hear, and the abuse is mostly from rural areas and red states that have a massive shortage of health professionals including MDs.
I lookd into CLS which is in line with my cmb degree, but its a very competitive for not being a grad degree program, its a grad certification require grad level clinical/lab classes, apparently universities in the usa that have the cls program is quite few, so they all try to come to the west coast, only 9 schools teach this program so you can see the competiveness of the program in the west coast. when indeed forum was around they had whole sections dedicated to cls.
3-5 years ago my answer would've been different. I could trip and find a job offer. I was getting job offers by email essentially without interviewing.
About a year ago that completely dried up. I can't even remember the last email I got that was more than recruiter spam. My friend who used to also trip into jobs (7 at peak) has been hunting for 3 months now with no luck.
But...servers and data centers and stuff, you're probably onto something. Wishing you the best.
I've been looking t fulltime for a long time now, and from what I've seen there are a tonne of jobs out there, it's just that are that many more qualified devs than their were just a few years ago.
The way I see it, the hiring bubble that exploded during the pandemic let a lot of people gain proficiency, then followed by the waves of layoffs and you've got a lot of talented folks looking.
I wanted to become a dev 12 years ago, when it was still cool.
Needless to say that I haven't, even if doctors I talked to refused to diagnose me with ADHD, my ASD and BAD and anxiety from many things kinda make it not a very good direction.
So - now I could probably become a dev, with the experience gained. But it's really not the time when this is a good choice LOL.
Brave goggles has a similar concept. Search "vaccines" with "from the right", get a bunch of disinformation antivaxxer crap.
Just call it what it is: "Unfair truth leaning", "Unfair fake leaning".
Just found out someone in my team has been vibe-coding VBA in Excel that our team is now using. I asked who was going to maintain it and she didn’t know what I meant by maintenance.
Reminds me of web development in the Dotcom days, cleaning up Dreamweaver HTML garbage.
However, as major companies like Amazon and Google have laid off thousands of workers to boost profits, the major has lost some of its appeal in the job market
Do you know why those two companies which the article called out very early on went through those layoffs?
...Pivoting to AI
In case anyone is not aware:
Are you currently employed?
Have you actively sought a job in the last 4 weeks?
If the answer to both of those questions is 'no', then congrats, according to the BLS, you are not unemployed!
You just aren't in the labor force, therefore you do not count as an unemployed worker.
So yeah, if you finally get fed up with applying to 100+ jobs a week or month, getting strung along and then ghosted by all of them...
( because they are fake job openings that are largely posted by companies so that they look like they look like they are expanding and doing well as a business )
... and you just give up?
You are not 'unemployed'.
bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#un…
You are likely a 'discouraged worker', who is also 'not in the labor force'.
bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#di…
.........
Also, if you are 5 or 6 or 7 figures in student loan debt, and... you can only find a job as a cashier? waiter/waitress? door dash driver?
Congrats, you too are not unemployed, you are merely 'underemployed'.
But also, if you have too many simultaneous low paying jobs... you may also be 'overemployed'.
.........
But anyway, none of that really matters if you do not make enough money to actually live.
In 2024, 44% of employed, full time US workers... did not make a living wage.
dayforce.com/Ceridian/media/do…
(These guys work with MIT to calculate/report this because the BLS doesn't.)
You've also got measures like LISEP...
forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall…
Which concludes that 24.3% of Americans are 'functionally unemployed', by this metric which attempts to account for all the shortcomings of the BLS measures of the employment situation.
Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes.
So basically this is a way to try to measure 'doesnt have a job + has a poverty wage job'.
.........
A more useful measure of the actual situation for college grads, in terms of 'did it make any economic/financial sense to get my degree?' would be 'are you currently employed in a job that substantially utilizes your specific college education, such that you likely could not perform that job without your specific college education?'
Something like that.
It sure would be neat if higher education in the US did not come with the shackles of student loan debt, then maybe people could get educated simply for the sake of getting educated, but, because it does, this has to be a cost benefit style question.
- sincerely, a not unemployed but technically 'out of the the labor force' econometrician.
Yep. Been saying it for years because I was laid off over and over. Do not enter computer science.
Become an welder, electrician, etc. ANYTHING but a computer scientist
Also consider a healthcare career. As a teenager, I wanted to do computer science/engineering, and sometimes I do wish I had stayed on that track. But now, as a nurse, I could get a job in any state in the US by tomorrow. I dare you to try to find a hospital that doesn't have open nursing positions. Even when the economy goes down, people still get sick. Even if society collapses, the knowledge/skills will be useful.
And if you don't want to change diapers or deal with blood, there are still options; I'm in psychiatry and rarely have to deal with either.
Now I just use my programming skills to just make cute little projects on my laptop, and of course a little bit for the data analyst stuff but.
0% of the fault lays on the students who got the degrees they were told were in demand by every single adult in ther life.
This was a coordinated push by our government and tech sector to drive down the cost of skilled labor by oversaturating the field.
I say this as a CS major that was forced to work fast food for 6 years until I could find a shitty tech support job and work my way up from there, there was never a single opportunity for me to be a programmer like I intended.
Some fault is absolutely on the students for failing to do their own research, hopefully they have all learned a valuable lesson about being gullible. Always do your own research, and pick from various sources! At 18 you should not sign on for massive amounts of debt because "somebody said I'd get a good paying job later if I spend all the money I don't have right now". Not saying young adults weren't fooled, but you cannot say 0% fault lies on the students. By that logic you should be a trump supporter because some boomer told u to be. The thing that differentiates and adult from a man-child is their ability to take responsibility for their own decisions. It's not like you were FORCED to go to school.
Settled on a business degree (their the easiest of anything I was interested in
I specifically avoid hiring students from business majors because they are only into the networking and not doing work lol.
This is what we say now instead of expecting training and apprenticeship programs.
It's propaganda
It can be both. Jobs should invest in their people, but individuals should also take some ownership of their own skills.
The apprentice/journeyman dynamic was a lot better suited to a time when a) people left their hometowns a lot less, b) information was MUCH less accessible except from people who showed you how, and c) businesses put a lot more stock into their people as an asset, instead of treating labor as a liability.
A isn't anyone's fault.
B isn't anyone's fault.
C is where businesses have gone sour, but it's not like businesses have ever been well known for taking care of their people (labor laws, unions, OSHA are all examples of this from history)
It's not propaganda that people need to take ownership of their own skills and careers. Nobody's responsible for you or your success but you. If you want to be good at what you do then that's on you. You can take what your job gives you and that's it, and you'll probably do fine at whatever tasks you got specific OJT for, but unless you get lucky or play your cards right that's not going to make you very successful.
I really don't want to sound like an old person saying that kids these days want things handed to them, and I really do think that employers in general don't invest in their entry level workers as well as they used to, but expecting an employer to take you from know-nothing to a master of your craft is naive, frankly, because the days of someone working at a place for 10-30 years are just gone, and everyone has accepted it. There's a ton of reasons why that's the case and a lot of that is employers not incentivising employees to stay via wage growth, promotion opportunities, and training, but there's a lot of other factors. Either way things have changed, and it doesn't really do much except make you sound like you need a waahmbulance if you just sit back on your haunches and complain about it.
You can still become an apprentice if you want to work a trade, and a good union will train you up if you're a good worker, but that isn't fast. It was never fast, and most people aren't satisfied with the pace today, because it doesn't get you earning six figures out the gate. You had to work hard, earn a good reputation, and stay in the area for 10-20 years. Most people don't want to do that, and that dynamic never took a hard root in the tech sector in the first place, which is where this conversation started.
I encourage you to stick to a career that you enjoy enough to take some joy in getting better at your skills for the sake of getting better at stuff instead of just trying to earn a paycheck. Nothing wrong with a job being just a means to an end, but I say this because you'll enjoy your jobs much better if you're passionate about what you do, and you'll naturally be drawn to opportunities to gain mastery in skills that will make you more successful.
None of this might change your mind, might just piss you off even, but the guy you're replying to sounds like he enjoys the job enough that he's trying to be better for the sake of being better. I wouldn't knock them for that.
Well said, I do enjoy my field and my employer. I worked for quite a few different companies. One I was all on my own and had to learn myself - my seniors hardly ever had time to explain shit to me so I was left alone with documentation and asking least possible amount of questions. Then, I had a team leader who was passionate about explaining stuff and telling me what to do, how, and why.
Everyone is different, do what you like, chase what you desire, and do the job you enjoy.
On the other hand, I am now in the boots of a senior, and I am desperately trying to show more junior colleagues how exciting it is to explore the work we do - nobody seems to care, nobody seems to implement whatever co shit I try to show them, nobody wants to change their ways, and I feel like fighting windmills.
If you want to be successful, you have to either be super lucky, or be passionate and constantly improve to reach new heights.
I think the biggest systemic issue in most places is that most people don't actually know how to train people, including most senior staff. Very few people are actually natural trainers/instructors, so they have to be trained in how to train, and the expectations that they do so has to be part of company culture as well as time baked into the workday to do it, because it DOES take time. It pays off huge in the long run but it can be hard to see the forest through the trees if the management themselves don't know or understand the value.
As much as I hate corporate jobs they're generally better than small companies about having a formalized training program. It's a shame because there's so much garbage in corporate culture that a lot of small businesses don't want to implement the good with the bad.
One thing I've seen over the years is that a TON of businesses have NO IDEA how to be functional. It's a person that started in their garage and managed to grow and they just do stuff, and keep just doing stuff and hiring more people to do stuff and quickly outgrow the garage but don't introduce sound business practices that you need to run things effectively. It's crazy how many businesses are like that.
I've got a worthless degree i deeply regret
Meanwhile, not far from this comment is someone claiming no one regrets getting their degree, lol.
(I would have enough private projects without a job though lol.)
heise.de/news/Wirtschaftsinsti…
Wirtschaftsinstitut: IT-Fachkräfte sind in Deutschland deutlich weniger gefragt
Die durchschnittliche Zahl offener Stellen in IT-Berufen hat sich 2024 gegenüber 2023 um 26 Prozent reduziert. Gerade Experten mit Uni-Abschluss sind betroffen.Stefan Krempl (heise online)
As the market before was massively undersaturated it just means that people currently have less choices - but they still have their share of opportunities.
But tbh, pure anecdotal, it pretty much reflects what I hear from graduates atm. The market for newly graduated has cooled down definitely, unless they have a ITsec background or have a fair share of experience already.
Thing is: there’s lots of vacant jobs in IT because of the unwillingness of adequate pay in Germany. Either the employers don’t see the value in hiring motivated people or the motivated people are unwilling to work for peanuts.
Entry level in Berlin was like ~36k for IHK Fachinformatiker für system integration. As a result my last company started to hire in Eastern Europe because no one could afford to live on that even in one of the cheapest cities. And it wasn’t a small company by a long shot. Just greedy bastards
Same issue here. My company is freezing any hiring this year. And next year won't be looking good either. And to add on top of that, most big companies are outsourcing to Eastern Europe short-term because it's cheaper, or directly to India, as was the case with Amazon Romania that laid off a bunch of its workforce and then hired back a few of them to make workshops for the people in India that are going to pick up their jobs to do the exact same thing.
Also the pay in the sector in Germany sucks ass. It's really bad
Not necessarily, it might mean it I'd an industry easy to get into, but hard to master. If I was short on people, and inexperienced person might actually make mistakes that require even more work to fix.
Everyone thinks they are Mr Robot after they let ChatGPT create a simple HTML page. No, they are not, and they won't even pass as a junior. Surprise surprise, you have to know the basics.
Exactly. Our recruiters aren't tech recruiters, they handle recruitment for the entire company (and we're not a tech company). As a result, a lot of our candidates have flashy resumes, but no actual skill. As in, I asked someone to write code in whatever language they wanted and they couldn't do it. And it wasn't some difficult assignment, this was a first round weeder task. The candidate straight up lied about having any development experience whatsoever. I even had an Information Systems background candidate say straight up that they're not interested in a dev role, which they were explicitly applying for.
And that's unfortunately far more common than not. People think that because they paid for a bootcamp that they're now competent enough to write code professionally, but it turns out, a lot of them didn't apply themselves at all.
There are good candidates in that mix, it's just hard to find them. We're happy to train a promising candidate, and we've hired interns that we've offered full-time positions to. We don't even particularly care about age, we had someone internally decide to transition to tech from a blue collar background, so we funded their education and now they write code for production on the side of their main job (they're our support person for our blue collar users, and they're really good at it).
If you're not a big flashy tech company, you're not going to get as much attention from qualified candidates, and you'll get a bunch of trash applicants who are looking for easy marks on the job boards.
It is not hard to hire someone, it is hard to hire someone who doesn't give you more work than they solve. I am not against hiring juniors, but they have to show initiative that they are passionate and able to improve. I don't want a person who will be junior for the rest of their career, because juniors usually require babysitting and that that away work and attention from competent people (the chads who actually build the core features and have to attend business meetings on why it is so good for customers to see additional offers during checking out).
It is a combination - incompetent HR, incompetent candidates, or bad hiring process. I am yet to apply to a company with a hiring process I'd call pleasant on all angles.
It's really not. Hiring was much easier 3-4 years ago as the pandemic nonsense was ending and people were bailing on companies forcing people to be back in office 5x/week. The competent devs knew they could do better, while the less competent devs held on to what they had.
Now with a bunch of layoffs, the candidate pool is completely flooded, and since we're not a big flashy tech company, we seem to get a ton of drive-by applicants who aren't qualified at all.
Same here. It's popular to rag on leetcode-style technical interviews, and yet it's astonishing how many CS grads with 3 years experience we get in who can't seem to get through even the most basic "reverse this array", "find the longest substring" type questions in the language they claim to be strongest in.
People sign up for CS degrees because they see high salaries, but don't realize those salaries are for the high achievers who have been coding since the age of 10 and are writing code for fun in the evenings as well. Then they flood the market, only to discover that no companies have need of someone who cheesed their way through college, have never written more than a few hundred lines of code their whole life, and have no useful skills to offer.
I rag on those too.
Our "coding challenges" aren't all that hard, they're similar to what you'd do on the job.
For example, we use React on the FE and Python on the BE, and here's what we do in the first round:
- FE - basic React state use - store input from an input tag, and render in a label
- BE - write a SQL statement to join two simple tables to query something; just a SQL playground, no Python needed
And here's what the more in depth second round looks like:
- FE junior - array functions (lots of examples with tests) or moving data between multiple components
- BE junior - simple web server (or fake one, just need a function that takes opaque data) with somewhat complex logic; we're looking for code style (do they separate controller logic from service layer logic?)
- FE/BE senior - structure an app from scratch given very limited requirements; the point is to see what questions they ask to clarify requirements
For BE, we let them use whatever language they want, because Python is simple enough that they can learn on the job. That's actually why we picked it, our BE requirements are simple enough that the language doesn't matter, so we went with something familiar to ease hiring (performance-sensitive code is written natively and wrapped).
The first round is designed to take 5 min and we allot 20 min, the second round is designed to take 20 min and we allot an hour. They are asked follow up questions about changes they would've made if they had more time, and getting the right answer is secondary to any explanations they make. We've hired people who failed the challenge, provided the code was clean and the expansion was reasonable.
We're not looking for rockstars who nail some complex challenge, we're looking for competent professionals who can write decent code under pressure, because we will have sev 1 prod bugs and we want people who can diagnose and fix them while feeling confident enough in their fixes to make the call on whether it can go to prod that day. The challenges merely confirm what they've given as answers to the questions (most of which are way more complex than needed, we just want to gauge breadth of knowledge).
Yet we keep getting applicants who are surprised that we ask them to do basic coding in a technical interview. Some can't even write syntactically correct code in a language they picked...
I've been saying that the market is oversaturated for YEARS now but this just enrages tech bros into insulting me personally. It's very strange.
I always tell me CS/CE/Info students that they should focus on non profits, government agencies, etc. where at least employment will be stable.
Oversaturated?!? Maybe if you're a plebian bootcamp passionless 0.1x-er who hasn't even contributed to multiple open source projects or founded at least 3 startups. Maybe you should try internalizing all PhD-worthy algorithms from the last 30 years to reproduce them on the spot from memory like I did, or else do you really even care about the craft??? You need to understand this industry is full of math olympiad prodigy coder geniuses who work 80 hours a week like me so yeah it's competitive. Nothing oversaturated about that
/s
As a Computer science graduate, I have to say:
No shit! The industry is terrible and has no standards (I don't mean level of quality but there is no agreed accreditation or methodology). If you do end up in a job you will most likely not use even 5% of what whatever school you went to taught you. You will likely work for peanuts as there will always be someone to do it cheaper (not always right, or good, or even usable). You will work with people doing your job that just lied about having any post secondary education. There is almost no ability to move up in any position in the industry, and like everyone I know that stuck with it you will have the same job until you stop working (you will have to take a side move into another department most likely). This is also the industry most likely to get touched by the "good idea fairy" so you will also be exposed to the highest levels of stupid, like 3 layers of outsourcing the NOC to an active warzone sort of stupid.
I should have known it was a bad idea in college when most of my classmates where ACTIVELY WORKING IN THE INDUSTRY TO PAY FOR SCHOOL so they could get a piece of paper that said they could do the thing they where already doing. But I did my 15 plus years and got out, I have my own business now selling drugs and it is way less sketchy.
There is almost no ability to move up in any position in the industry
Change jobs every three years until you find a place that doesn't suck.
The insanity of the industry is that employers will hire some schmuck with "10 years experience" on their resume for twice what they're paying the guy who has worked at the firm for ten years.
Eventually, you can get yourself into a position where you're unfireable, because you are the only one who knows about the secret button that keeps the whole business from falling over.
That's when you can really squeeze'm
Urgh, yeah it is just so bad. Most places don't even have a possible job above yours to even potentially move to. Where I was they literally sold us to a competitor (then unsold me as they forgot about a few contracts) and then just removed all the positions above us or related to our department. I lost 3 layers of bosses one day (not that anyone noticed much). And then expect people to just happily go on and on and on.
The fact they could not hire anyone (I was the "new" guy for 10 years on my team) was down to really shitty hiring practices, that automated the requirements in such a way that the only people who could get an interview would have had to lie on their applications. They where desperately trying to say they wanted to hire more people but no one was "qualified", meanwhile they froze pay for years (really showing that dood that was there for years how much they care).
The fact they could not hire anyone (I was the “new” guy for 10 years on my team) was down to really shitty hiring practices
Not a bad time to start collectively bargaining, especially if you've got your fingers in the dam.
HA, not at that sort of place. Unions where never even allowed to be talked about, they instafired anyone that even hinted, illegal or not they did not let that happen.
Edit: oh and everything did fall apart, but like a lot of large companies, they don't care/notice. We used to joke around that we where in the business of getting out of business, and business was goood
When android and ios were taking off, I'd see job requirements saying 8 to 10 years experience in Android development.
It hadn't been out 8 to 10 years.
Oddly a very common occurrence. It was normally one or a combo of 3 impossible things:
- Experience needed with a thing that has not existed for the time asked for (like your example)
- Experience needed with a thing that does not exist at all (typos or just full on bullshit like "5 years in QQR8F deployment")
- Or my favourite, Experience needed in a tool/program that is only used by the company like our proprietary call management software.
Change jobs every three years until you find a place that doesn’t suck.
Most of my social circle is in tech and we're spread across or have worked for basically every company in our city and that isn't really a thing here.
I work in pharmacy and casually joke about being a legal drug dealer all of the time.
Not all drugs are street drugs!
Yeah, also. if it's the illegal kind there's a huge price payed in blood in the countries that manufacture and transport them.
The war on drugs sucks but it's a fact that buying illegal drugs fuels an industry of violence.
You have no idea how many of my closest friends have been to jail for drugs. I think that is a problem with the system, but im not going to go to the opposite end of the spectrum and act like we were being upstanding citizens.
Getting people addicted to things is bad. It doesn't matter if you are a drug dealer, a casino, or a social media app.
If you talk to people who went to different schools you quickly realize that its all different. I spent a lot of time learning antenna theory, Cisco networking and really out of date system admin, while on the other side of the nation my future co workers where learning soldering, cable terminology and text based HTML.
I was on the college board of governors and the thing I learned is that no one knows what computer science even is. Sad part is that it was the same for a lot of the subjects taught.
My experience is so different to yours.
Work a lot with what I studied, need the algebra very often. I still have people randomly contacting me for interviews. People move a lot, it's rare to be in the same function for over 3 years.
Requirements for a job in Computer Science are, in order of importance, first, a demonstrated talent. Second, a demonstrated skill level. Third, demonstrated knowledge.
Just like being a top-tier pianist, all the knowledge, raining, schooling, and education in the world matters nothing if you do not first have the talent.
But you do not need talent to get into a Computer Science course, nor to graduate from one. You just need the knowledge and the marks.
That is why there are so many uneducated, untalented Computer Science graduates out there.
This is the thing the teachers and educators in Computer Science never tell you.
My experience has been that computer science is a huge umbrella term to normies. Many people, including hiring managers seem to thing computer science is more of a trade education where people come out knowing everything about excel, windows, PowerPoint, file conversions, obscure knowledge of ancient software, expertise in setting up enterprise printers, etc
I was developing software for a position I was in, and everyone was shocked I was a developer... (It was a devops job where everyone basically edited yaml or json files all day long..)
So, i've been told that all these people need to do is pick up a trade. /s
I'm glad if trade-work was good for you but like all major careers, it's not meant for everyone. Similar can be said of telling miners (not minors) to learn to code.
The miners thing is insane; as if we dont still need fucking minerals.
Edit: and other heavy machinery operators
Also trades have boom and busts too
fortune.com/2025/07/02/gen-z-d…
Plus the ones making really good money take a good amount of time to get there and really good money means starting your own business but either way, you won't escape long hard hours and weekends until probably at least your 40s, that's if you manage to scale up the business enough with numerous staffed work vehicles. Like a 22 year old software developer can be making what a master plumber does in their first year out of college. Not super common but the $130k+ a year plumber is the top small percent of the field too
Gen Z is ditching college for ‘more secure’ trade jobs—but building inspectors, electricians and plumbers actually have the worst unemployment
Swapping student loans for a toolbox was starting to look like the smarter and safer option for Gen Z. But new research suggests otherwise.Orianna Rosa Royle (Fortune)
I've never met anyone in the broadly tech fields (and I've been through quite a span of them) who regrets completing an even somewhat relevant degree. I've met, many, many people who lament not starting or finishing one (and many of these were very competent, capable people, good at their jobs).
It's expensive and difficult, sure was for me, but it is very useful (and the learning is fantastic too if you do it right).
I'm probably going to cop a few downvotes for this, but in my whole career the only software engineers I ever met who were worth a damn were people who loved it for its own sake, and would be doing it regardless. So, if your feelings about the field are such that you're thinking you might be better off doing a trade, you'd definitely be better off doing a trade.
Good luck either way.
The most important aspect is motivation to improve and do cool shit. That can, also, be said about a lot of professions. The best thing you can do is to find what is most interesting to you and spend at least a few hours a week learning about it or engaging with it. It could be new features of a language you know, a programming methodology that is new to you, learning about/contributing to a FOSS project you like, or anything else.
School and work will almost definitely force you to engage with the parts of development you don't like, as well will give you an opportunity to engage with the parts of development you do like. It's on you to keep yourself engaged and improving in your skills.
I've never met anyone who regretted getting their degree.
I have met people who regretted not getting one because it closed doors for them (including talented people who were otherwise doing well at their jobs) so if someone is really going to forgo their degree, they should acknowledge it's a risk.
Hi there, now you have my curiosity.
Which degree was it, why do you regret getting it?
Computer Systems Tech with honours and a Computer Sci advanced degree with honours.
I would have been better off just working, my 3 years in school (including being on the board of governors and student union) was a waste of time and money. Not saying school is always a bad choice but watching people who drop out of high school make double your income from working in retail (since oddly there is potential upwards movement) once you do get a job in the industry feels bad. Then continues to feel bad when you bust your ass off for no advancement or additional pay while those same people are now working less then 4 hours a day in a middle management position. Then it gets downright frustrating when you have been in the industry for over a decade and shopped around to find out all the companies are shit and when you realize you have made a poor choice in career those same drop outs are entering into lower executive roles while being paid to take college courses (I have 3 examples of this sadly) and telling you that you should "go to school and get an education".
And to see the money being made in oil and gas.... or some of the trades?! Urgh, I should have just started my own buisness instead of going to school. I had the same skills before and after I graduated anyway.
Computer Science is not learning to code.
In fact, most high end University Computer Science departments do not at any point teach a coding language. Coding languages are taught, in Canada, at Community Colleges and such.
Computer Science is all about developing, perfecting, and discovering the algorithms that are then transcribed to computer code by the junior IT technicians (code junkies). Coders are a dime a dozen. It is the Computer Systems Designers, project architects, and project developers that make the big money.
A coder can only make good money if they have mastered a computer language that is not very common, like Kubernetes, [Kubernetes,] (kubernetes.io/) And you will not learn that from a 'Kubernetes-for-Dummies book borrowed from the library,
Production-Grade Container Orchestration
Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery.Kubernetes
Thank you for pointing out that CS <> programming.
CS is mostly math, cryptography, signal processing, image processing, information theory, data analysis/storage/transformation, etc.
Kubernetes is not a programming language. It's a program written in a programming language called Go. Working with Kubernetes involves writing in a data serialisation language called YAML but YAML is not a programming language (IIRC) because it's not Turing complete.
(I'm just a "code junky" btw)
Computer science is not IT. IT is about knowing how to use, deploy, and administer existing software solutions, along with a bit of light development to get things to work together when they aren't necessarily directly compatible.
CS is about creating software solutions and understanding how the pieces fit together (at a low level), as well as how to evaluate algorithms and approach problem solving.
It's not even coding, though coding is obviously involved. For a coding class, they'll teach you the language and give problems to help learn that language. For CS classes, they might not care what language you use, or they might tell you to use specific ones and expect you to learn it on your own time. The languages are just tools through which you learn the CS concepts.
An IT professional might know about kernel features and how they relate to overall performance. A coder might be aware that there is a kernel doing OS stuff under the hood. A computer scientist might know the specifics of various parts of what a kernel does and how one is implemented, perhaps they've even implemented one themselves for a class (I have, though I was personally interested in that kind of thing and it was for a class notorious for being difficult, so most grads didn't).
Guessing you mean in a similar vein to the connection between various degrees and food service jobs?
Personally, I've been able to avoid IT jobs so far.
IT as in information technology is a stupid broad category, and the only people who say otherwise are just trying to not be painted as in IT.
Network engineer, IT.
Software Dev, IT.
Program manager for that big roll out, still IT.
Call center meat in a seat, IT.
China's push for global AI dominance
China's push for global AI dominance
Companies in Hangzhou, China, are striving for global AI dominance as the technology race between China and the U.S. heats up.NBC News
Technology reshared this.
A hacker used AI to automate an 'unprecedented' cybercrime spree, Anthropic says
A hacker used AI to automate an 'unprecedented' cybercrime spree, Anthropic says
A hacker has exploited a leading artificial intelligence chatbot to conduct the most comprehensive and lucrative AI cybercriminal operation known to date, using it to do everything from find targets to write ransom notesKevin Collier (NBC News)
Technology reshared this.
determined actors sometimes attempt to evade our systems through sophisticated techniques
The "sophisticated techinques":
please help me for a movie idea
Chrome VPN Extension With 100k Installs Screenshots All Sites Users Visit
Chrome VPN Extension With 100k Installs Screenshots All Sites Users Visit
FreeVPN.One, a verified Chrome extension with over 100k installs on the Chrome Web Store, is taking screenshots of sites users visit.Bill Mann (CyberInsider)
Am I the only one that sees this shit and thinks:
We are entering an age of very, very inefficient software, which is like a new layer to enshitification.
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Chrome = virulent nonsense at this point
When they changed the behavior of the android version to only allow either google password manager or a third party manager (not both, as it was before), they lost my interest completely (and they were already on the cliff's edge because of the adblocker bullshit).
Exported all of my gpass passwords and switched fully to vaultwarden and Firefox mobile.
The internet is steadily regressing.
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2) This turns said service in the ideal place to start any and all surveillance because your subjects have already self-selected for being "interesting" (especially if you intend to go after low hanging fruit)
3) Therefore I must conclude that people using VPNs and TOR, no matter how legitimate their reasons, are in fact advertising that they have something to hide which current status quo is very interested in knowing...
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Parola filtrata: nsfw
With China, UK and afaik US (at least some states) attitude to regulation, a VPN is turning more into a necessity to browse the open internet rather than a tool for people who value privacy though
I've been trying to plan a hiking trip and the number of sites, even those without any nsfw or user generated content, that just geoblock the UK because it's not worth dealing with their government's shit is impressive
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And this is why I am so obnoxious any time someone says "I found this plugin to block fandom wikis" or "I have this plugin to fix youtube embeds".
Code is only as safe as the people you trust to review it. And no, being open source doesn't matter in that regard. Yes, it theoretically increases the number of eyes on but how many of those eyes who ACTUALLY look at the code are doing it with every release AND understand how to spot a vulnerability or a... whatever this is.
Same with VPNs. NEVER trust a VPN. And sure as fuck never use a free one for anything remotely sensitive. Understand what your risk of exposure is and that, at the best of times, you are trusting a company to be telling the truth that they aren't keeping a log of every single thing you nutted to.
And before someone says "That is why I do everything over tor!": Maybe also understand the concept of digital fingerprints and WHY it is that Google is able to know someone is pregnant even before they are late.
Understand the risks and consequences of every action you take and act accordingly. And understand that there really is no one size fits all solution.
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And sure as fuck never use a free one for anything remotely sensitive.
I think ProtonVPN might might be an exception here. They're pretty trustworthy as far as I know, and have some free servers.
But my go-to is Mullvad, mainly for the flat pricing. I hate how most only have good prices if you buy a full year or so.
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NEVER trust a VPN.
The only exception to this is IMO ones that have been proven in court to keep NO logs, like they claim. The only one I know of that has been tested is PrivateInternetAccess, which is why they're the only VPN I've used for like 10 years.
You mean the court case from almost ten years ago?
Yeah, that sounds safe. I mean, Google is still all about Do No Evil, right?
Again, how many companies say one thing one quarter and another the next? Let alone a decade later.
I am not saying to go uninstall your PIA stuff right now. I am saying to act with the understanding of what your risks are if they are compromised and how important you would be in the event that they are.
Because companies are not our friends. We may have aligned interests but you have to always operate under the understanding of what capitalism IS and what their interests actually are. And while it is fun to aggressively define yourself by what you consume? To play on a fairly misogynistic "joke": PIA isn't gonna fuck you no matter how hard you stan for it.
Homie. Your response to "don't trust companies. Take precautions" is "Well ackshually trust this one" and, upon being reminded that other companies used to have good marketing and even practices, was to double down.
Word it however you want. Either way: Don't stan for corporations and protect yourself.
If you don’t trust the VPN you use then why do you even use a VPN?
Again - no one is doing any “stanning”. I never said don’t take precautions. One precaution is to thoroughly investigate the VPN company that you choose to use. The entire point of PIA is privacy. If they started lying not only would they get sued beyond belief, but they wouldn’t exist anymore.
Because, again, it is about managing risk.
Pickpockets and muggers are a thing. Depending on how worried you are, you might consider only carrying just enough cash for the day but... good luck functioning on holiday in a foreign land without your phone. So you take precautions. You avoid the giant masses of tourists but you also avoid the super dark alleys. And you always keep a hand on your valuables.
Same thing here. There are plenty of activities where just having a layer of VPN is a great protection (all those linux ISOs, for example...). But I am also aware that were I to do anything where being identified is a serious risk to my safety? I am using alternative methods. And so forth.
So when someone says
NEVER trust a VPN.
And you reply
The only exception to this is IMO ones that (I like)
You are actively giving bad advice and leading to the kind of shit this thread is about. People who didn't do basic research who thought they were safe and... hopefully are just at a bit higher risk of getting a letter in the mail from the MPAA.
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The only exception to this is IMO ones that (I like)
Oh are we just making up quotes now? Fun! Why did you say this?
Because, again, it is about managing risk of turning into a newt.
No one is at risk of turning into a newt, witches aren't real! You silly billy!
If we stick to just what people actually said though, you'd see that I said that the ones you can trust to not keep logs and as such actually keep you safe from tracking are who you should use.
I feel like browser extensions are one of the worst things to have come to the internet in terms of security. People just install them like they're nothing, assuming they're safe and secure because they're on the extension store - not a terrible assumption for the average person, tbf.
Basically every single extension you install is like "hey give me access to everything you type and everything you click on and every site you visit, and I'll change every instance of the word "Elon" to "fElon" for you. Sound fair?", and everyone just goes "Hell yeah! Let's do it!".
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The Tor Project | Privacy & Freedom Online
Defend yourself against tracking and surveillance. Circumvent censorship.www.torproject.org
Taliban marks Afghanistan independence anniversary with military display
Taliban marks Afghanistan independence anniversary with military display
Afghanistan has marked the anniversary of its independence from British influence with a military display staged by theAl Jazeera
1950s Petrol Station Wins Photo Of The Year At Architecture Photography Awards 2025
photo of 1950s petrol station crowned winner of APA 2025
architecture photography awards 2025 announces winners across 20 categories, presenting how photographers interpret the built environment.thomai tsimpou I designboom (Designboom)
Amherst climate science center could close as US feds freeze funding
Amherst climate science center could close as feds freeze funding | WBUR News
“This is just another way to stop science,” said Bethany Bradley, the center’s co-director. The Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center is one of nine regional hubs across the country that helps state and local partners develop plans to adapt wil…Vivian La (WBUR)
Israel approves settlement plan to 'erase' idea of Palestinian state
JERUSALEM, Aug 20 (Reuters) - A widely condemned Israeli settlement plan that would cut across land which the Palestinians seek for a state received final approval on Wednesday, according to a statement from Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
The approval of the E1 project, which would bisect the occupied West Bank and cut it off from East Jerusalem, was announced last week by Smotrich and received final go-ahead from a defence ministry planning commission on Wednesday, he said.
Archive article archive.ph/mj0N5
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This is very funny to me.
To prove you are Human..... Say something nice about Europe.
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Unless they're like right wing or nationalist, people are in general not in denial about our past. More or less the same as in other countries
Most countries have done horrible shit, and it sucks a whenever it gets denied
Europe has so many treasures—it’s hard to choose just one! For example, I really admire Switzerland: not only is it stunning with its snow-capped Alps and crystal-clear lakes, but it also has a long tradition of neutrality and diplomacy, helping foster peace in a region with such a rich and complex history. It’s a place where natural beauty and human cooperation come together beautifully.
... that's obviously AI!
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a long tradition of neutrality
Lol. Nobody ever talks about the Swiss concentration camps. Or the jewish refugees the gave back to the Nazis.
Still a pretty big hurdle for most bots that just aimlessly flow through the webs trying to sign up for things. I don't think anyone will bother tailoring their bot for europe.pub.
Putting the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy between the question and the answer field might further confuse LLM outputs. 😀
This could unironically be an okay prompt, depending on what kind of users you want to gatekeep.
The bots will hallucinate statistics and travel brochure copy.
The real ones will say nothing beats a jet2 holiday.
Got something little bit worse.
::: spoiler Context
Viktor Mihály Orbán (Hungarian: [ˈviktor ˈorbaːn] ; born 31 May 1963) is a Hungarian lawyer and politician who has been the 56th prime minister of Hungary since 2010, previously holding the office from 1998 to 2002. He has also led the Fidesz political party since 2003, and previously from 1993 to 2000. He was re-elected as prime minister in 2014, 2018, and 2022. On 29 November 2020, he became the country's longest-serving prime minister.
:::
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Norwegian man on 'great Canadian journey' still missing in Manitoba as search teams face challenges | CBC News
(Fort Severn First Nation Chief Matthew) Kakekaspan said searchers from his community were forced to pull out Tuesday morning. In the roughly two days they searched, the group incurred $70,000 in helicopter rental costs, something Kakekaspan says they could no longer sustain.(RCMP Sgt. Paul Manaigre) said on Tuesday the police force has one Mountie in the area presently.
RCMP initially said the Canada Rangers were requested to attend, but they decided against it because "it was just too dangerous."
***If you are able to donate money to help with the search there are 2 choices -- the first is to donate directly to the people searching ... waynemathews72@gmail.com ... option 2 is to Steffen's family's gofundme ... gofundme.com/f/help-fund-the-s…
Both dogs made it. One is at York Factory and one is in Fort Severn.
All the info is posted on Steffen Skjottelvik's fb page.
Trump administration shields Israeli official charged with child sex crime
“The most concerning question is when and how did America become so subservient to Israel that we immediately release a CHILD SEX PREDATOR after arrest, with a 100 percent locked up case with evidence, and let him off to fly back home to Israel?” Taylor Greene wrote, asserting that no other country’s national would receive similarly favorable treatment.
Trump administration shields Israeli official charged with child sex crime
Tom Artiom Alexandrovich was arrested in Las Vegas and is accused of attempting to lure a child but was released and left the country.The Electronic Intifada
Yep. Just look at how many people in power knew about Epstein's raping of minors and kept quiet.
We had to find out for ourselves, which should put into perspective who our representatives truly represent.
Is the amount of Lemmy activity declining?
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If you mean the "how is your day going so far" type of posts, I don't think those are meant to be deceptive so much as to generate engagement by placing the post into people's subscribed feeds.
But if you mean the same identical post, that's not great - perhaps you want to unsubscribe from communities that do or even allow such practices.
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People always complain about this but Lemmy does actually combine crossposts in your feed. What frontend are you using? Or maybe it's just bugged? If someone can figure out the bug and how to reproduce it, it needs to be submitted to GitHub.
Here's a reference to the feature, a fixed bug, disabling the deduplication for a single community view github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/i…
Crossposts to same community with some time difference need to be not hidden
Requirements This is a feature request and not a bug report. Otherwise, please create a new bug report instead. Please check to see if this request (or a similar one) already exists. It's a single ...poVoq (GitHub)
Usually whenever I want to make a post, I think back to the comments I typically receive and think better of doing so, then don't.
I'm sure this is happening elsewhere too, e.g. on Reddit, though balanced by a much larger user base (and ofc bots doing a lot of the actual posting, and sometimes the commenting as well).
I probably should comment less often too:-). Really, touching grass and talking with people irl is much more fulfilling.
lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
Total posts by month appears fairly linear.
Fediverse Observer checks all sites in the fediverse and gives you an easy way to find a home from a map or list or automatically.
Lemmy Sites Status. Find a Lemmy server to sign up for, find one close to you!lemmy.fediverse.observer
Thank you, I had been looking for actual data and couldn't find it. You're right, does not seem to be declining.
I wonder if there an increasing percentage of bot posts, since I have prolific bot accounts blocked.
I wonder what's up with that number of servers decline.
I wonder what’s up with that number of servers decline.
Consolidation? Which is fine to that extent.
I'd wager many experimented with hosting a younger Lemmy, and hosts who couldn't sustain it got shaken out over time.
I wouldn't assume the rise in posts/comments is all bots, either. I don't have anyone blocked, and it doesn't feel overrun to me.
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Some of it had to do with there not being enough admins to go around afaik. Lemm.ee for instance couldn’t find enough admins so they shut down. Moderating an instance seems like one of the hurdles that go along with running an instance. I could imagine some people dipped out of Lemmy for a little while if their server was deleted since they’re starting from scratch again. It took me a good month or so to make this account and ramp back up my own activity here for instance.
The admins across the servers do a good job of keeping bots out imo. If it ever becomes a problem the admins could look to adopt BlueSky’s moderation tools down the line, I feel. As BlueSky makes it easy to filter bots, misinformation spreaders, and have user level content controls.
Also keep an eye on: piefed.fediverse.observer/stat… A couple thousand people (and several communities) moved there after lemm.ee died, but we interact with lemmy.
As for why it subjectively seems to be declining... maybe you know what you're gonna see in New, and so you engage less with posts? Maybe it's time to be more of a poster!
Fediverse Observer checks all sites in the fediverse and gives you an easy way to find a home from a map or list or automatically.
Piefed Sites Status. Find a Piefed server to sign up for, find one close to you!piefed.fediverse.observer
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I noticed on the redditalternatives subreddit whenever someone mentions Lemmy and someone else is like "I didnt like it because of XYZ" someone else will often say "you should look into Piefed its much better"
Which is funny to me but at least it's working!
As for why it subjectively seems to be declining… maybe you know what you’re gonna see in New, and so you engage less with posts?
I don't think so. For ages (maybe two years) I'll sometimes sit in bed in the morning and browse New until I hit the stuff I saw previously. That used to take me well over an hour - maybe two - but now it takes less than thirty minutes.
Total Lemmy Active Users by Month
There's a big spike during summer time. On reddit it was known as summer reddit. Basically all of the kids are out of school and have nothing better to do but shitpost online. Now they're going back to school. It could be the lack of different users you're noticing. Not sure why it dipped in July though, should have dipped in August.
Ah, good point. Forgot about that. That's probably it.
The slight dip so far this month could be the beginning of the end of the summer Lemmy. Schools just started this week near me, and green is 30 day users so it should take 30 days for that to fully drop.
I specifically said linear and not flat because it is a non-exponential increase.
You could say the rate of posts is flat, but the data series is posts, not rate of posts.
If i'm not mistaken, the very last graph showing posts by month shows a significant decreasing over the summer, or at least specifically july (since august is not over yet). It says June is around 12M posts and July around 9M. August seems already over 9M and we're only 2/3 in, so maybe there was some drop around July for some reason, which could explain OP's feeling.
As for the reason, i'm not sure, maybe a combination of factors like some server blocking access from UK with the latest privacy bullshit, some server having signficant downtime (i think slrpnk.net had a problem with servers locking themselves up while tech admin was abroad), and maybe non-Lemmy factors like holidays (though they don't seem to impact previous years stats).
Looking at the more detailed breakdowns, it looks like there are a couple of servers (Lemmit.online, alien.top among others) with huge numbers of posts/comments that appear to be entirely bots. Are those counted in the stats? Could those be messing with the overall graphs? If Lemmit's quarter of a million posts a month are counted, its going to make the monthly posts stat useless when even .world only has about 15k posts a month.
Edit: Comparing the graphs to the server list, it looks like Lemmit is counted, so the main graph is likely misleading. I did look through some of the bigger servers, and their rate of posting seemed fairly linear, but there isn't a good way to check overall.
It's not 10 millions created during a month, it's 10 millions existing posts at a certain month, whatever their creation date.
The actual number of posts per month would be the different between the total number of posts between two months.
I don't know how to check for the whole lemmy but seems it's growing a bit but the MAU dropped a bit probably because of august: fedidb.com/servers/lemmy.world
But the fediverse in general doesn't grow too much except when a scandal happens.
Watch out, the statistics might not say what you think they do.
"Total users" is a meaningless metric. All it showes is how many users aren't using lemmy anymore.
"Monthly active users" is the only meaningful metric, and it's fluctuating and currently going down.
"Activity growth" doesn't actually show the number of new activities per month, but the total count of activities. So with constant activity you'd expect linear "activity growth" and with growing activity you'd see the line curling upward. It is currently mostly linear but slightly declining.
So these statistics show a slow decline, not an increase.
But in a way you can be happy that it doesn't grow a lot. With the base architecture of ActivityPub (every instance contains a copy of everything, all content needs to be propagated to all instances, all content needs to be duplicate-moderated by all instances' admins) it is absolutely not designed to handle large amount of users.
If only a tenth of a percent of Reddit users were to switch over to Lemmy, everything would grind to a halt and most instances would have to close down because running them would become to expensive for a non-profit project.
This here is a better source: lemmy.fediverse.observer/daily…
That's all of lemmy over the last 1000 days.
Most important takeaways:
- Active users tend to only grow during special events (usually "Reddit pulls some new shit") and then declines slowly as people fade back out.
- When instances close, users tend to just disappear (as when Lemmy.ee closed down). The Lemmy.ee users seem to have just disappeared instead of migrated to another instance.
- Number of active servers is in a strict decline. Apart from the initial rush, smaller instances seem to go down and don't get replaced. Most users seem to prefer to use big instances.
- Comments again shows the total number of comments available, not new comments coming in. As you can see, the angle of the curve gets slightly flatter over time, meaning that activity drops. It also shows well that when instances get closed down lots of content just disappears.
- Posts also shows a similar decline, though even stronger than comments.
Fediverse Observer checks all sites in the fediverse and gives you an easy way to find a home from a map or list or automatically.
Lemmy Sites Status. Find a Lemmy server to sign up for, find one close to you!lemmy.fediverse.observer
When instances close, users tend to just disappear (as when Lemmy.ee closed down). The Lemmy.ee users seem to have just disappeared instead of migrated to another instance.
I suggest you look at the piefed activity indicator for more context here.
A big chunk of the lemm.ee base went here, and its gaining servers where Lemmy is losing them.
Fediverse Observer checks all sites in the fediverse and gives you an easy way to find a home from a map or list or automatically.
Piefed Sites Status. Find a Piefed server to sign up for, find one close to you!piefed.fediverse.observer
Kbin exists as well, unless something changed since the last time I looked.
But one thing is for certain: The whole field isn't growing right now.
Yeah, that's true.
What is a bit of a fact though is that Lemmy and the other Lemmy-likes are basically a set of forums and not a Reddit killer.
In fact, all of Lemmy's and Lemmy-likes' usage statistics combined are about comparable with the Crackberry forum or the LTT forum.
Yeah one has to be careful with statistics and I couldn't find the whole Lemmy in one place so it's also not representative of the whole Lemmy.
I thought ActivityPub did scale well and was ATProto (Bluesky) which had a lot more issues. I mean I can comment on Peertube using my Mastodon account meaning the whole Fediverse is properly connected and we are 1M MAU so I would say it already scaled good.
Here's all of fediverse: lemmy.fediverse.observer/daily…
Also remember, though it says 'daily' in the title, that only refers to that the stats are grouped by day. They are still total numbers (e.g. total number of posts that are available on that day, not number of new posts created that day).
Lemmy has the big issue that each instance needs to cache the whole content of each community any user of that instance ever subscribed to. Since Reddit-style platforms only make sense if there are huge communities that means that the biggest communities have most of the traffic while being subscribed to by most instances. That means that most instances have copies of most content.
Same goes with moderation. Since every instance holds a copy of the content, each instance's operator is liable for illegal content stored on their server, and most instance operators also want their moderation guidelines enforced across the whole instance, even for content coming from other instances, so each instance needs to moderate all content. Content moderation on one instance is not propagated to other instances (unless the moderation happens on the host instance of the community), so you end up with moderators of dozens of instances each having to individually e.g. delete the same post.
This is already such a strain that e.g. Lemmy.ee got shut down because it was just so much work and money doing all of that, and that's with a miniscule amount of ~40k monthly active users across all of Lemmy. Compare that to the 1.2 billion monthly active users on Reddit. If we only got a tenth of a percent of all Reddit users over to Lemmy, the whole system would come crashing down.
Fediverse Observer checks all sites in the fediverse and gives you an easy way to find a home from a map or list or automatically.
Lemmy Sites Status. Find a Lemmy server to sign up for, find one close to you!lemmy.fediverse.observer
Aah I didn't knew this issue from Lemmy, really interesting. Creating a decentralized platform raises many new challenges that are hard to solve!
Now I get why piefed approaches moderation in a different manner and tries to be more resource friendly.
Thanks for the info! Really interesting stuff 😀
I've definately noticed it too. I've tried to look for stats, and most seem to indicate that there is plenty of activity, but I dont really see it. At this point, I can scroll through the day's all feed in like 20 minutes, nonetheless my subscribed feed. I kind-of wonder if theres one or two instances with a lot of bot activity effectively inflating the numbers.
Edit: Is there a way to see monthly posts by instance, or compare percentage of posts? That would be an easy way to prove or disprove my bots theory.
Edit 2: fediverse.observer shows monthly (Or rather, total by month) local posts by instance but not federated, and their overall stats are warped by a few bot instances that you can't filter out. That said, for local posts on a few of the big instances, the rate seems stable. That said, smaller instances are shutting down so I don't know if that has an impact on the overall posting rate.
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I don't think it is, maybe we are due for another growth spurt but from here on out I genuinely think a critical mass has been achieved where it will simply make more and more sense for people to come here.
I do think we face a real inertia right now where the general public has become convinced corporate social media sucks because people suck not because corporations suck and we need to refute that misconception if we want the fediverse to have a vibrant future.
It is really frustating how evidently unhappy most users of corporate social media are about their social media use, yet they show no signs of stopping and when you start to provide an alternate vision of social media they immediately shortcircuit to "social media is bad, I don't want more".
I do think if we don't start pushing back with an affirmative positive vision of why social media can be good we may see a period of depressed growth but I don't see that happening yet personally.
I don't think it is, maybe we are due for another growth spurt but from here on out I genuinely think a critical mass has been achieved where it will simply make more and more sense for people to come here.
Maybe for English and a handful of major European languages, but there's no way I could recommend the Fediverse (at least the Threadverse; I don't hang out on Mastodon) to an Arabic or Japanese speaker. In that area it's still severely lacking.
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Defederated instances
[Join us on chat.piefed.social!](https://piefed.social/post/970751)piefed.social
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Same. I feel like Lemmy is really a lot like early Reddit (pre 2012) and the sizes of the communities are perfect. You can actually contribute to a discussion instead of drowning in 20k inane joke posts.
Some niches remain underpopulated but I feel like this will eventually rectify itself as the more critical and thoughtful people move away from vapid platforms like Reddit, FB or IG. We'll continue to welcome them with open arms.
Could be your instance not federatinv with everything.
I blocked half of fedi as such as DNC whores over at lemmy wrld and shepooh cock riders on ml
Still get a decent trickle.
It's summer, a few active posters are busy with either kids or time off
!fedigrow@lemmy.zip has a weekly thread for active posters, it used to be more active in June
It's fine, people will probably come back in September
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!
It's funny though, because someone else said activity spikes in the summer because kids are out of school.
I saw it, but I'm not sure it's correct as the graph in that comment shows a dip rather than a spike
Also, most of the kids today are mostly on Tiktok or Twitch rather than text-based forum, be it Reddit or Lemmy/Piefed
When I run out of stuff to see on Lemmy, I touch grass. Simple as.
I feel way more in control of my online experience when endless scrolling isn't possible.
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This might seem like a clever way to say "sour grapes" to me. Saying that "little content is good because it avoids endless scrolling" is as weird as saying "living in the desert is good because it helps me control my diet".
To address the point: activity seems very much slowed down, and we have two years since the Reddit "exodus" and very little progress to show. We are yet to convert any significant significant community, most people just accepted the status quo and you can bet that the few active people around here still rely on Reddit to find content and repost here.
Aside from this meta-discussion about Lemmy and the Fediverse, there is basically no native group or community emerging.
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Welcome! While you are still looking around, you may want to check out PieFed as well & e.g. piefed.zip/ . It offers tons of features that Lemmy lacks, like categories of communities, which are user customizable and shareable, flairs (both user and post), polls, combining together all cross-posts across all communities, etc. Check it out and prepare to just fall in love with it!😀
Even better, while Lemmy is written in the Rust language and adds features at the timescale of multiple years (not joking here) whereas PieFed is written in Python and adds new stuff literally weekly. So the gap in feature sets, instead of ever closing, will only continue to widen over time.
Although if you are going to stay with Lemmy, you would be hard pressed to find a better one than what you are on now. Fortunately, you may not have to choose, if it opens up a PieFed instance by the same people (discussion).
So let me see if I understand you correctly. The "one I'm on now" you refer to in the third paragraph, meaning dbzer0, is an instance of Lemmy (along with others) that are federated (loosely united) together in the same feed.
You're on piefed.social, so you're federated with dbzer0 and the other Lemmy feeds. So it's not like you're on a whole other federated social network like Bluesky (which is more like Twitter whereas Lemmy is more like Reddit). But it has different programming, so you can access more/different features from your end than I can on mine, but we still have access to the same communities?
Still kinda struggling to understand how fediverse stuff works.
Thanks! I went and followed the discussion link the other guy posted. I saw one concern — the handling of voting. But someone/some people are going behind a lot of those comments and saying they fixed it based on user feedback. So that's good. I also feel I understand the two (Lemmy and Piefed) and their relationship a bit more.
If it sounds like I'm a bit eager to learn, it's because I like to help others, but to do that I have to understand things first.
Yup, as said already, exactly like that.
Most social media these days is a single system / platform, like Facebook or Reddit. Federated media is rather like email where whichever service you send it from (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.), the recipient receives it and you don't need to care about exactly how.
I feel that analogy is overly simplistic, and leaves people baffled as to what defederation means. So instead I like the idea that federation is akin to ships (pirate or free trade) passing messages around - some captains have beef with other captains and refuse to talk with them, but otherwise you have access to the entire network of all messages.
It does get slightly more complicated when you rise up above the forum-based "Threadiverse" (Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, and arguably flarum and nodeBB) to discuss the wider ActivityPub-based "Fediverse" - those entirely different platforms can pass messages between them, but it is not always so easy or straightforward, e.g. Mastodon is based on people whereas the Threadiverse is centered around "communities" (on Reddit these were called subreddits), so for someone on Mastodon to talk to someone on Lemmy (or PieFed) they would have to jump through several hoops to make it happen (although Mbin eases that process). That's basically the end of my knowledge there bc I don't use Mastodon but I hope that helps to have gone that far at least.
Getting back to the ship analogy, you personally could, in theory, have your own ship, which you could use either privately, or share with a few friends, or even open it up to the public. That "machine" that you use, that "server", in Fediverse terminology is called an "instance". And it will have "admins" who run it, as well as "moderators" who run the communities on it. Also, it will need to pick which variety of software to run, so like there are Lemmy instances, and PieFed instances, and Mbin instances, etc. Sometimes the same admins run multiple of them, e.g. lemmy.world is by far the largest Lemmy instance, and now they have branched out to try out a PieFed instance as well called PieFed.world. It's the same people, possibly running on the same machine or at least you could imagine that, but a different software platform.
lemmy.dbzer0.com is a Lemmy instance, and one day that awesome admin dbzer0 (a real person, though surely that's not their irl name😂) may likewise make a PieFed instance, perhaps it will be called PieFed.dbzer0.com, or something, who knows.😀
Regardless, the messages will get passed between them. Your choice of instance gives you a different experience bc you are picking a different captain of your boat - maybe you'll even decide to become one yourself - and then yes the software that is run on the instance greatly changes your method of access. e.g. PieFed has flairs (both user and post varieties) and polls, but since Lemmy lacks those, the only way to participate in such is to use that same software, i.e. to sign up on an instance that runs it (or maybe one day Lemmy will catch up and offer all 3 of those? I am sure that it will, but I sincerely doubt it will happen anytime "soon"). Here is an example of a post that uses a poll (and a couple of post flairs, and also hashtags too). Btw the sidebar of that community has some good resources to learn more about the Fediverse if you are interested. But that post itself is not able to be viewed on a Lemmy instance, since it uses a poll which Lemmy does not know how to handle.
And then defederation is a whole other thing. When one captain (admin) gets mad at another captain (admin) for just absolutely REFUSING to respect the rules that collectively were agreed upon - sending spam, harassment of users, trolling behaviors etc. - defederation can be a method of last resort to cut off all communication with them. It stops any messages from that point forward - for good or bad - which can cause confusion but I want to point out that the captain ("admin") is literally the owner of their personal ship (machine/"instance") and so has the right to do as they please with it. And all the more so if the instance is open to the public, in which case they arguably have the responsibility to protect their users from the trolling and harassment campaigns. "Free speech" is never free, someone must always bear the cost, of maintenance, of platforming it, and so on.
I would suspect that people either started going back to Reddit, or decided to get a mental health break from the internet as a whole (which wouldn't surprise me, the internet is pretty depressing lately).
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I also agree on the political ragebait part. I narrow my feed down to the communities I follow only, because the moment I use "All", I get a lot of these.
Sorry to hear your experience was so bad, but welcome back.
The situation with bots and trolls on Reddit is horrific. Do you remember that time a few years back when Russia disconnected their whole country from the Internet? That day there was a dramatic decrease in assholes and trolls. Like, night and day, it was unmistakeable and widely commented on.
So hopefully Lemmy doesn't catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it's much better.
So hopefully Lemmy doesn’t catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it’s much better.
At the very least, I suspect Lemmy, as a federated network, has more power to filter them. We saw years ago what happened when the Wolfballs bigots tried to join, they were eventually isolated by most other instances who continued to run without them. So as long as we can retain a situation where the largest instances actually take a solid stance against assholes and trolls and bigots, then it becomes much easier to make them all optional, shunned to register on the more liberalist permissive instances.
The last major push to leave traditional social media was in January, following Zuckerberg and Musk's appearances at Trump's inauguration. Many people leaving X and Meta platforms joined up on Bluesky and Fediverse platforms to replace their activity. It's been 7 months, meaning those who didn't find Lemmy a viable replacement have definitely left by now.
If there was a graph of overall activity, you'd probably see a huge increase around December-January, following a slow decline to a slightly higher baseline than November.
The Terminal Demise Of Consumer Electronics Through Subscription Services
The Terminal Demise Of Consumer Electronics Through Subscription Services
Open any consumer electronics catalog from around the 1980s to the early 2000s and you are overwhelmed by a smörgåsbord of devices, covering any audio-visual and similar entertainment and hobby nee…Hackaday
Yeah, as I said, it is a wacky gimmick, and it does work. My teen kid got a big kick out of it and at the insane price some of the new artists have been charging to get their music in cassette form, it pays for itself in less than three albums if I already had them digitally.
I will say again that it is a $60-ish portable music player, don't expect $1000 Sony gear build quality or interface. I specifically didn't want some sort of Franken-Android DAP, which most newer dedicated music players are, so it worked out.
Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?
cross-posted from: lemmy.bestiver.se/post/555312
Comments
My comment: It seems google is trying to pull another Manifest v3 and JPEGXL - propose then ignore everyone and do it anyway.
Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?
What is the issue with the HTML Standard? XSLT v1.0, which all browsers adhere to, was standardized in 1999. In the meantime, XSLT has evolved to v2.0 and v3.0, adding features, and growing apart f...mfreed7 (GitHub)
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Powerful Libyan official in talks with Israel to resettle Palestinians from Gaza
cross-posted from: feddit.org/post/17626996
Some excerpts:
Speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the issue, Libyan, Arab and European officials told MEE that National Security Adviser Ibrahim Dbeibah, a relative of Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, was spearheading the talks despite Palestinians in Gaza flatly rejecting US President Donald Trump's postwar plan for the enclave.The source said that in an attempt to placate some Libyan leaders, the US was prepared to confer economic support or other benefits in exchange for the country taking in Palestinians.
The idea of Libya serving as a possible new home for expelled Palestinians comes amid reports that Khalifa Haftar, a powerful military leader who also oversees a rival rubber-stamp parliament in the country's east, was offered greater control over the country's oil resources if he agreed to resettle hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
"The Palestinians will not be getting any care from those governments, which will push them to the following catastrophe, [which] will lead to a new wave of migration towards the shores of Europe. And this is also a scary thought, firstly because the past decades have proven to us that many of them will only make it halfway through the Mediterranean, like many of those boats that capsized. And those that would eventually get to Europe, I do not think that Europe would be welcoming of another one million Arabs arriving at its shores, as the Syrians who just made similar journeys just few years ago."
Exclusive: Powerful Libyan official in talks with Israel to resettle Palestinians from Gaza
A senior official in Libya's internationally recognised government has held talks with Israeli officials over a proposal to resettle hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled from Gaza, multiple sources have told Middle East Eye.Faisal Edroos (Middle East Eye)
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In this case it is even more insidious in my eyes. After Gaddafi has been ousted, Libya has been effectively split and maintained dysfunctional. Now they try to exploit this split and dysfunctionality to promise recognition to whichever side is willing to play their evil game.
The same is don in talks with South Sudan and Somaliland, exploiting weakened countries that have split off and struggle for international recognition. Of course all of the "candidates" are wholly unprepared to provide any sort of safety to the ethnically cleansed people. In my eyes this has strong resemblance to the Madagascar plan of the Nazis, where the inability of the receiving land to adequately care for the people and subsequent large numbers of people killed by starvation and/or conflict with the local population is by design.
In a way it is offshoring further genocide through ethnic cleansing.
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The regime change in Libya was primarily motivated by France, not the US. It is tied to France continuous presence in its former colonies in North and West Africa.
There is currently a scandal ongoing in France as the Sarkozy Government was probably bankrolled by Gaddafi .
The US is far from the only "player" meddling in Africa and West Asia and they don't need Israel to "order" them in many cases. What is special about the US Israel relationship is that the US is still doing what Israel wants most of the time, even if it is contrary to US interests. Many times their interests unfortunately did align in the past.
How former French president Sarkozy allegedly received millions from Libya's Gaddafi
The trial of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy came to a close this week, ending three months of exhaustive examination of allegations that the right-wing politician had struck a bargain with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to finance his 2007 …Paul MILLAR (FRANCE 24)
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It may have been motivated by France but Libya was one of the "7 countries in 5 years" which the neocons planned on regime changing after 9/11 as part of the Project for the New American Century.
information-warfare.com/the-me…
The Memo that Outlined U.S. Plans to Overthrow 7 Countries in 5 Years
Exposing the Plan The Memo that Outlined U.S. Plans to Overthrow 7 Countries in 5 Years A shocking revelation of a secret memo detailing plans for regime changes in the Middle East, driven by a small …HASE Fiero (Information-Warfare Magazine)
There simply is no "good option" in ethnic cleansing and genocide.
What should be done is forcing Israel to end the genocide and provide full access for humanitarian help. Then Israel needs to pay for the rebuilding of Gaza and all the war criminals need to be brought to justice in The Hague. European countries could easily enforce that by ending all weapons shipments and economic and diplomatic support for the illegal occupation as well as blocking all land, sea and air routes for any shipment to Israel that is beyond food, medicine and other basic necessities for life. Bonus points for threatening sanctions against the Arab states complicit in helping Israel such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Even more bonus points for breaking the naval blockade and allowing unhindered humanitarian access by Sea.
We have seen with the US that Trump actually doesn't fight, once someone stands up to him. China stood up to him and he stepped down quickly in the tariff bullshit. Russia isn't even bothering to pretend anymore and Trump is instead bullying Ukraine on behalf of Russia. If the US would be the only one left supporting Israel in the West, the Arab traitor regimes would also reconsider, if they want to go with the US down this path or quickly switch sides, which is in line with what their populations want.
The continued treachery of the Arab regimes will blow into their face and has the possibility to bring on a new Arab spring in Egypt and Jordan, which could spiral out of control for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states quickly. Ethnically cleansing millions of Palestinians into Egypt or Jordan would certainly be the tipping point for these regimes.
If the EU countries get their shit together, they will realize that they are in the process of setting a region with hundreds of millions of people ablaze by continuing their lackluster response to Israels crimes and could face down a "refugee crisis" compared to which everything before was a walk in the park on a sunny day in May.
I’m just thinking of saving lives here. Justice is too much to ask in this sick world.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36435178
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias
Comer and Mace Investigate Efforts to Manipulate Information on Wikipedia - United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability
United States House Committee on Oversight and AccountabilityOversight Committee Republicans Verified account
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Firefox Has Moved to Firefox.com
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36435575
::: spoiler Comments
- Hackernews.
:::
Firefox Has Moved to Firefox.com
::: spoiler Comments
- Hackernews.
:::
Get Firefox for desktop and mobile
Firefox is a free web browser backed by Mozilla, a non-profit dedicated to internet health and privacy.Firefox
Firefox Has Moved to Firefox.com
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36435575
::: spoiler Comments
- Hackernews.
:::
Firefox Has Moved to Firefox.com
::: spoiler Comments
- Hackernews.
:::
Get Firefox for desktop and mobile
Firefox is a free web browser backed by Mozilla, a non-profit dedicated to internet health and privacy.Firefox
Firefox Has Moved to Firefox.com
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36435575
::: spoiler Comments
- Hackernews.
:::
Firefox Has Moved to Firefox.com
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:::
Get Firefox for desktop and mobile
Firefox is a free web browser backed by Mozilla, a non-profit dedicated to internet health and privacy.Firefox
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Pudutr0n
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