https://mas.to/@timwaterman/116464080355561059

If you don’t have the resources to write and understand the code yourself, you don’t have the resources to maintain it either.

Any monkey with a keyboard can write code. Writing code has never been hard. People were churning out crappy code en masse way before generative AI and LLMs. I know because I’ve seen it, I’ve had to work with it, and I no doubt wrote (and continue to write) my share of it.

What’s never been easy, and what remains difficult, is figuring out the right problem to solve, solving it elegantly, and doing so in a way that’s maintainable and sustainable given your means.

Code is not an artefact, code is a machine. Code is either a living thing or it is dead and decaying. You don’t just write code and you’re done. It’s a perpetual first draft that you constantly iterate on, and, depending on what it does and how much of that has to do with meeting the evolving needs of the people it serves, it may never be done. With occasional exceptions (perhaps? maybe?) for well-defined and narrowly-scoped tools, done code is dead code.

So much of what we call “writing” code is actually changing, iterating on, investigating issues with, fixing, and improving code. And to do that you must not only understand the problem you’re solving but also how you’re solving it (or how you thought you were solving it) through the code you’ve already written and the code you still have to write.

So it should come as no surprise that one of the hardest things in development is understanding someone else’s code, let alone fixing it when something doesn’t work as it should. Because it’s not about knowing this programming language or that (learning a programming language is the easiest part of coding), or this framework or that, or even knowing this design pattern or that (although all of these are important prerequisites for comprehension) but understanding what was going on in someone else’s head when they wrote the code the way they wrote it to solve a particular problem.

It frankly boggles my mind that some people are advocating for automating the easy part (writing code) by exponentially scaling the difficult part (understanding how exactly someone else – in this case, a junior dev who knows all the hows of things but none of the whys – decided to solve the problem). It is, to borrow a technical term, ass-backwards.

They might as well call vibe coding duct-tape-driven development or technical debt as a service.

🤷‍♂️

#AI #LLMs #vibeCoding #softwareDevelopment #design #craft

RE: https://veganism.social/@vega/116082348193137301

“Israeli military data identifies over 50,000 foreign nationals, including Western and Arab citizens, serving during the Gaza genocide.

…

According to figures published by Yedioth Ahronoth and detailed in regional reporting, the largest contingent consists of 12,135 United States nationals.

They are followed by 6,127 French nationals and 5,067 Russian nationals.

The data further records 3,901 German nationals, 3,210 Ukrainian nationals, 1,686 British nationals, and 1,675 Romanian nationals serving in the army.

…

Legal experts say the participation of foreign nationals opens the door to prosecutions under the principle of universal jurisdiction, allowing courts to pursue suspected war crimes regardless of nationality or location.

…

Several countries have already seen legal action. Canadian federal police opened investigations into suspected war crimes believed to involve dual-national reservists. In Belgium and the United Kingdom, rights organizations filed complaints before national authorities and the International Criminal Court targeting hundreds of individuals, including European citizens.”

Language is a funny thing… You know what they call a state that is committing genocide in the US, Germany, UK, and parts of the EU?

An ally.

“‘They dragged little Greta [Thunberg] by her hair before our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag. They did everything imaginable to her, as a warning to others,’ the Turkish activist Ersin Çelik, a participant in the Sumud flotilla, told Anadolu news agency.

Lorenzo D’Agostino, a journalist and another flotilla participant, said after returning to Istanbul that Thunberg was ‘wrapped in the Israeli flag and paraded like a trophy’ – a scene described with disbelief and anger by those who witnessed it.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/04/greta-thunberg-israel-gaza-sweden

#israel #genocide #ethnicCleansing #apartheid #settlerColonialism #Gaza #Palestine #GretaThunberg #GlobalSumudFlotilla #StopIsrael #StopTheGenocide #FreePalestine

I just don’t know what to write anymore. Israel is committing genocide with the full support of our countries in the West.

What do I say to my friends in Palestine who don’t know if they’re going to survive the night? That we are morally vacuous? That we are horrible human beings? That we’ve lost any semblance of humanity we might have had? That we deserve their eternal wrath?

What do you say about societies that, far from failing to prevent genocide, support and profit from it?

Zionists love to ask you if their genocidal project deserves to exist. They’re not asking a broad enough question. Does a system that cannot even prevent genocide deserve to exist? What is the purpose of us if we are to exist shackled to the bloody whims of the worst of humanity?

Since Microsoft is organising a European Sovereign Tech Fund, we should ask Lockheed Martin to put together a European Sovereign Defense Fund. There’s probably also opportunity here to bring Amazon in to advise on EU labour standards and have McDonald’s take the lead on food safety policy in the EU.

CC @EUCommission

#EU #USA #corporateCapture #europeanSovereignTechFund #microsoft #github #openSource #freeSoftware #tech #freedom #humanRights #democracy

“Microsoft to install facial-recognition technology in stores, which could be used to identify individual customers: When a shopper approaches the shelf, she would see a price calibrated specifically for her. The next shopper might pay a different amount based on their profile. Retailers could use shopper data to charge higher prices to those who can afford to pay more.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/retail-grocery-automation-esl-kroger/

It’s OK, if you don’t like it, you can just simply not buy food.

#surveillance #capitalism #microsoft #BigTech #dystopia

Via @ErickaSimone & @broadwaybabyto

A reminder that Greenland is part of the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT) of the EU and Greenlandic citizens are EU citizens.

Any move by Trump and the US to invade and annex Greenland would be a declaration of war with the EU and a gross violation of its 1951 treaty to protect Greenland from attack. (Though not ironic as the mafia never protects you from itself.) Furthermore, an attack on a NATO member would be deemed an attack on all other NATO members (Art 5) and a violation of the treaty (Art 8).

If neither EU nor NATO members did anything to protect Greenland/Denmark against the US’s overwhelming military might (as is likely) – and, remember, US troops are already in Greenland and in other EU countries also – it would signal that no EU or NATO state is safe should a stronger military decide to invade.

If anything, if the EU hasn’t understood it yet, it must start treating the US not as an ally but as a threat. Trump isn’t a clown. He’s the fascist leader of the country with – in the words of Kamala Harris – the world’s most lethal military.

We must shore up our defenses because it is becoming impossible to ignore that the EU is caught between two hostile forces: a fascist US on the one side and a fascist Russia on the other, neither of which have two shits to give about international law (that was a quaint concept while it lasted, wasn’t it?)

Either we learn to defend ourselves in the EU or we become a vassal state of Gilead. And, as much as I oppose militaries – in a world in which they very much exist – I’d much rather it wasn’t the latter.

https://www.salon.com/2025/01/24/horrendous-call-with-denmark-pm-over-greenland-deal-left-danes-in-crisis-mode/

#USA #fascism #EU #Greenland #Denmark #NATO #war

Nuff said…

Nuff said…

You EITHER federate with Meta/Threads and have them be a partner in your Social Web Foundation OR you support LGBTQ+ people and human rights for all.

You can’t do both.

Not after this.

The fact that we even have to fucking try to convince you to do the right thing is disgusting. What the fuck happened to you? Was it always just lip service? A fucking “unique selling point?” If not, pick a fucking side. It shouldn’t be too damn hard when one of those sides is fascism.

Americans: our founding fathers are rolling in their graves…

No they’re not. A whole bunch of them were slavers. You built your country on genocide and slavery. Get the fuck over yourselves.

US-based Malwarebytes acquires Swedish AzireVPN.

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/personal/2024/11/malwarebytes-acquires-azirevpn-to-fuel-additional-vpn-features-and-functionalities

FFS, EU companies, can you please, for the love of fuck, stop selling out to US corporations? We just lost a reputable EU-based VPN to the US right as Trump is about to take office.

Congratulations. Take fucking bow.

#AzireVPN #EU #US #VPN

Dear Americans,

Vote for Kamala Harris even though both candidates will continue to arm Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people because, yes, the alternative is worse and, yes, because your country – and others like it (the UK and Germany spring to mind) – is so morally bankrupt and undemocratic that your political system doesn’t even leave you the option of not supporting a genocide.

But don’t you dare stop there and pat yourselves on the back. (1/3)

Nuff said…

If your criterion for what makes a person smart or successful is how much money they have, you live in exactly the world you deserve. For everyone else, it’s up to us to relegate this shortsighted and self-destructive myth to the annals of history and build a kinder world with humane success criteria.

You will never advocate politely enough about social justice to please someone whose lifestyle depends on social injustice.

If the Twitter/X thing teaches you one thing, let it be this: Twitter was a neoliberal place. Then Elon Musk made it into X, a fascist place. Once again, neoliberalism laid the foundations of fascism. But that’s not the (whole) lesson… Neoliberal folks are still using X, calling it Twitter to make themselves feel better, and pining for the good old days. And there’s the real lesson: When neoliberalism turns into fascism, neoliberals will adapt to life under fascism. Right, class dismissed.