Because many tech jobs have become glorified vendor management. You don’t actually support anything yourself, you have a vendor sales rep and a technical rep or maybe two.

When something breaks or needs an update, you call/email the rep, go back and forth a few times, schedule a date for patching, and then create your 10,000th email Chain/Teams group chat with all the various people internally and externally who “need visibility” into the process. Everybody says their piece, argues about coverage or pricing, asks the same basic questions 5 different ways, so on and so forth.

Now multiply this by all the unique software/hardware components of your infrastructure. Add to that the AI executive-led slop fest, angry sarcastic, tech-illiterate end users, corporate software enshitification, etc.

Totally agree, I threw a quick filter on some public domain, actual human artwork, and cropped it square. Took me as long as it would have taken to generate that slop logo.

Here’s the original source: Citation

For the love of anything even mildly good or wholesome…enough of the fucking AI slop images!

Not only are his comics CC, his entire artistic workflow is built on FOSS. His art tablet runs Linux, he uses Krita for digital painting, his fonts and brushes are FOSS too, and he provides them free of charge for anybody to download.

He also provides free tutorials and guides on his setup and workflow, and advice one how to start using FOSS as a professional artist.

Finamp has been my goto for my music collection for several years. I know there are better solutions, but I’m not hardcore, I just want a simple app that streams my music from the server reliably.

The only thing that is a pain is getting all the tags and metadata correct, but there are lots of good apps to help with that also.

Looks great! I love the background glow!

Same conclusion for me. Been using Linux for years, Mint is the only distro I’ve used that #JustWorks in my experience.

I use LMDE as my personal laptop, it’s rock stable.

A handful of ones, mostly just what I run on my home systems, but I also have a Windows 10 and 11 iso for archival purposes, and just in case I have to run a Windows VM for some obscure reason in the future.

In mid to large cities in the US it was and still is depending on the situation. Historically, during hype cycles in tech, starting salaries can be crazy. Mostly at the FAANG companies, but even smaller companies would do this sometimes too.

During Covid, my spouse knew a guy who got hired right out of college, didn’t even complete his 4 year cyber security degree. Starting salary was 95K, with zero experience, and this was a mid-sized city.

And even if you weren’t getting six figures right out of college, you could land a job still making 65-85K starting as a junior dev, and within 18-24 months, jump ship or get promoted and be making 100K+

Also remember that depending on the city, 100K salary isn’t “that much” money, and places that are typical tech hubs in the US (San Francisco, Seattle, NYC) are also some of the most expensive places to live in the country, and often literally in the world.

Tech pay is wild in the USA because of the Silicon Valley culture and the massive government subsidies that the industry has gotten for decades to artificially pump its growth.

This is one of the reasons why tech workers have made almost no progress getting unionized, it’s a deliberate tactic by the industry. Pay super high salaries, sprinkle in some healthy American Individualist propaganda, and most people won’t have any incentive to unionize, they can always get a job that pays well to very well.

That’s finally starting to change, as enshitification takes over and tech companies begin to treat tech workers just as shittily as other kinds of workers. This AI bubble has already resulted in a ton of layoffs in the tech sector, when it finally pops, it will be absolutely devastating. Painful for millions, but probably will be the catalyst for a real unionization effort, and not just of tech workers, but workers in general.

Lot’s of non-political subs here, use the search feature and browse.

Start with !cat@lemmy.world

Of course, that’s what I said; in this Capitalist world, sometimes you have to compromise and choose a worse license in order to support FOSS.

MIT makes sense in a Capitalist world where corpos want all the advantages of FOSS without having to give up the massive amounts of money generated and protected by IP laws.

Copyleft licensing scares them away, and anything that scares mega-corps away is probably good.

Don’t get me wrong, MIT is still better than proprietary licensing, but not as good as strong Copyleft licensing like the GPL.

MIT is the most popular Open Source Permissive license. It’s permissive vs Copyleft like the GPL, meaning it doesn’t require the same license to modifications/forks. That means new contributions to MIT licensed code can be made closed source at any time, which is why it’s so popular in the Silicon Valley corporate Open Source space.

Companies love having the ability to start out Open Source so that can rapidly develop and get free code contributions from the community, then when their application gets super popular and deeply integrated, they change the license to something more restrictive to lock in customers/vendors/users and start getting more money.

That’s why some folks in the FOSS community don’t like it. It’s still better than straight up proprietary licenses, because the old MIT version can still be forked and remain open if there is a large enough community around it, (this happened a few years ago with Terraform and Open Tofu). Best though to just start out with a Copyleft license like the GPL.

It’s easy to slop together the 10 Billionth remake of Pacman, Minesweeper, Kanban board, ToDo list, etc.

Actually making something innovative, unique, interesting, and useful is tough. It requires skill, knowledge, creativity, and passion to keep at it long after the high of vibe coding your first solitaire game fades away.

If LLMs are blockchain 2.0, then Vibe coding is its NFT fad. Just a way to take advantage of useful idiots who think being a software engineer consists of typing code all day as fast as possible.

Same for me. I clearly separate my “experiemental” machines from my “just works” machines now.

My laptop runs LMDE, my servers are mostly Debian 13, a handful of Ubuntu Server in there. My gaming rig is Nobara Linux, which is just Glorious Egg roll’s gaming-optimized Fedora build. When I first set it up a few years ago, I had everything all customized, themes, fonts, icons, fancy desktop/window effects, etc.

I actually considered just going with something vanilla recently, not because I have had any major issues with my current set up, but just because I don’t feel like tinkering with it anymore.

My tinkering desire has shifted more and more towards server/enterprise infrastructure and DevOps automation.

I’m older now, my career has taken off, and with that comes more responsibilities and mental energy required during the workday, then family obligations through the week/month, etc. I find myself with less time and mental energy to just tinker and play with tech. So when I do find myself with a bit of free time, I want to maximize it and work on stuff that both helps with my actual career, and helps me get more stuff self-hosted for myself and my family.

Way back in college, I used to spend more time tweaking my PC’s overclock than actually gaming xD

It’s a lightweight, independent distro for power users. It’s also currently one of the very few distros still offering an official 32 bit version out of the box.

I use it on my oldest and lowest power machines. It’s snappy and stable. Plus, the name is badass, for whatever that’s worth lol.

Very true, but that may make things worse down the line. Once they realize that kids are circumventing their restrictions, they won’t think, “Hmm, maybe a blanket ban of social media for minors wasn’t a great idea.” They’re just going to double down and say that there needs to be more hardcore restrictions on all internet/computer activity. More sensorship, more data harvesting, mandatory governement spyware in all devices.

Essentially the Great Firewall in China. Many governments have already expressed interest in modeling national internet access after China.

To a large degree, yes, but blanket bans on social media use for minors will fail for multiple reasons.

1. This has already been the case in Australia, and the latest numbers indicate that a vast majority of youth still access social media via black/grey market account purchasing, VPNs, and other methods.
2. The ban doesn’t include some popular platforms like Telegram, which arguably provide a more risky experience, due to it being a popular platform for criminal activities.
3. Taking away a huge swath of social platforms from kids without providing any constructive or healthy alternatives will mainly encourage destructive behaviors.

Find what and where you can fight best, and throw your weight behind it. Don’t fall into dispair, that’s what they are counting on.

Some fight for better laws, some fight for better politicians, some hack, some donate, some build, some propagandize, some host and archive, some preach and philosophize.

The best often do several of these things. Find what you’re inclined towards and do it. We need every last drop of effort to defeat the corpos and their corrupt political allies.

You can’t stop the signal.

Wow, assuming you’re being genuine, I’m pretty surprised. It’s rare to encounter a true AI cultist.

Never was full fash, but was pretty deep into the right wing libertarian stuff in my mid to late teens.

Definitely started getting fed the typical alt-right algorithm pipeline, “leftists triggered” compilations, Sargon, Steven Crowder, Jordan Peterson, etc.

A few things shook me out of it:

• Went to University, got exposed to different perspectives and people.
• Started dating somebody who was open-minded and would gently but effectively challenge my views.
• Graduated and started having to pay off student loans, food, rent, got treated like trash at my first job and saw how Capitalist hierarchy screws people over unless you’re the owner.

It wasn’t a quick switch that flipped for me. It was a slow, gradual series of realizations that my worldview just didn’t make sense and didn’t line up with reality.