Hey everyone!
My current gig might be wrapping up soon, so itโs time for me to figure out whatโs next.
If you or someone you know could use some help with software tools or systems โ architecture, implementation, deployment, operations, data pipelines, CD, DX, etc โย maybe get in touch? Iโve been doing this a while and Iโm pretty flexible.
Iโm open to short-term or long-term, part-time or full-time. Iโm US-based (NYC area) and a US citizen.
General CV: http://aviflax.com/resume/
Energy-specific CV: http://aviflax.com/resume/energy/
Thanks in advance!
Me, an idiot: โSo, kids, by setting the thermostat a little lower and eating less meat, weโre doing our part to make the world more sustainableโ
VCs, very smart: โWe just raised $100 billion dollars from the sovereign wealth funds of three petrostates to build the worldโs largest AI supercomputer. It uses as much power and water as Guatemala and the primary use case is for management consultants to autogenerate powerpoints for justifying mass layoffs.โ
Trump getting a SCOTUS hearing on whether or not heโs an annointed king when he also personally hand-picked 1/3 of the very justices ruling on it in the same week where Harvey Weinsteinโs judgement gets appealed despite dozens of victims makes it so clear that ultra-rich white men can do anything, anywhere and with enough resources they will never face consequences for anything no matter how disgustingly they lead their lives and itโs fucking horrible and depressing to see this shit play out.
Found this handy blog post: Syncing Fastmail with Calendly by Stuart Knightley
https://stuartk.com/posts/syncing-fastmail-with-calendly/
Am I the only one who buys a Calendly plan every time I ramp up a job search?
I often hear from people discouraged about the slow pace of climate action. โWeโve tried so hard to tackle climate change and nothing changed,โ they say. โWhy even bother anymore?โ
While it may feel subtle or almost imperceptible at times, a lot has changed over the last decade. Just 10 years ago, 0.7% of cars sold around the world were electric vehicles. Today, 20% are. Before the Paris Agreement, the world was forecast to warm by up to 5 degrees C (9F). Now, as this article explains, that number has been dialed back to 2.7 degrees thanks to already enacted government policies around the world.
Of course we need to do more: the science is clear that every tenth of a degree of warming we avoid will prevent a measurable amount of loss and suffering. But a shift is underway, and if we donโt talk aboutย what has been accomplished as well as what still remains to be done, we are disempowering and discouraging people from taking action.
Read on for more good news, not so good news, and how you can help reach a target of 25,000 climate conversations this month!
offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).
Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it
The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.
Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.
Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.
So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.
I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.
And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.
That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.
@marcprecipice thanks for posting about Toggle awhile back! Iโve been using it since then and itโs been a real upgrade for me.
The Unicode Consortium has approved these emoji for use in chat during video calls:
๐ - I can't hear you
๐ - I can't see you
๐ - You're muted
Any "what's wrong with Tesla" business story that doesn't mention that the CEO has taken a hard right into racist, fascist, eugenicist, conspiracy nonsense, creating a PR catastrophe that has turned everyone with a brain off the brand, while he tortures his vanity social media site like a child pulling the wings off a fly because he can, is just whitewashing for the sociopath.
It's not China. It's not "the market." It's all Elon.
TIL Robin Sloan has a new novel coming out this summer!
https://bookshop.org/p/books/wizard-s-design-robin-sloan/20374751
Hmm I wonder what my set of frequently-used emoji says about how/what I communicateโฆ
Job Description: "fast-paced environment"
Otherwise known as: "we canโt project manage"
๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ
Why is the biggest TV ratings star in sports getting paid about the same as an office manager in a moderately successful company?
When I started making websites, โa designer who codesโ wasnโt a big deal. After all, the only place to procure the obscure people who made websites was Craigslist. Finding โa designer who codesโ seemed like the least odd thing youโd find.
The web was so new youโd always have the strangest concoction of disciplines amongst those who worked on it โ an english major doing product, an actor writing API code, or a poet who moving pixels. I encountered all these and it wasnโt strange, it was _cool_
Hey everyone!
My current gig might be wrapping up soon, so itโs time for me to figure out whatโs next.
If you or someone you know could use some help with software tools or systems โ architecture, implementation, deployment, operations, data pipelines, CD, DX, etc โย maybe get in touch? Iโve been doing this a while and Iโm pretty flexible.
Iโm open to short-term or long-term, part-time or full-time. Iโm US-based (NYC area) and a US citizen.
General CV: http://aviflax.com/resume/
Energy-specific CV: http://aviflax.com/resume/energy/
Thanks in advance!
Fascinating video essay about a groundbreaking comics writer in Argentina in the mid 20th century. Hector German Oesterheld. Creator of Mort Cinder and the Eternaut.
Amazon just sent me a โyour review is liveโ email for a review I submitted EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO.
All those rock star engineers, doing their rock star thing. ๐ค
WTF is going on with coffee tasting notes
โDad can we go to the Eclipse?
โNo, we have Eclipse at home
At home:
On the most recent episode of the Batteries Included podcast (about electric vehicles) one of the hosts, Martyn Lee (also the host of the excellent EV News Daily) described a recent article about a survey showing that Tesla has a plummeting โconsideration scoreโ with potential customers, which is related to its CEO.
They Martyn asked listeners to comment on whether this matters to them.
My response:
WRT Tesla and Musk: I currently own 2 Teslas and Iโve owned a total of 4. Unless things change, these will be my last. Theyโre great products but I canโt support a company headed by someone so toxic who is stoking conflict and animosity. I used to be proud to drive my Teslas around but no longer.
I would love to see Tesla find a new CEO, sooner rather than later. (And not a figurehead as in X.) Until then Iโm done with Tesla.
Fantastic, phenomenal, cogent, inspiring podcast interview:
Why Climate Change Isnโt the End of the World with Dr. Hannah Ritchie
(Deputy Editor and Lead Researcher at Our World in Data)
low-traffic neighborhoods (limiting car access to allow more bicycles & pedestrians) yield health benefits estimated at 100x cost to build https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/08/health-gains-of-low-traffic-schemes-up-to-100-times-greater-than-costs-study-finds
via @cassidoo