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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • One standout statistic was that projects with clear requirements documented before development started were 97 percent more likely to succeed. In comparison, one of the four pillars of the Agile Manifesto is “Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation.”

    Requirements ≠ Documentation. Any project with CLEAR requirements will be most likely to succeed. The hard part is the clear requirements, and not deviating.

    One Agile developer criticized the daily stand-up element, describing it to The Register as “a feast of regurgitation.”

    The inability of management to conduct productive meetings is even more well-known than their inability to conduct a decent hiring process, and we all know how broken that is.

    The study’s sample and methodology are not linked so I suspect a huge bias, in that the projects succeeding sans-Agile have been successful without it long term, while the Agile projects chose Agile because they were unsuccessful pre-adoption — you don’t adopt agile if you were already successfully delivering projects.





  • FOSS has spent the last few decades operating under the assumption that companies would give back for the greater good if they found value and grew dependent on a project. What they didn’t understand is that corporations are parasites who only care about immediate profits, and are more than happy to abuse the honor system indefinitely. There isn’t any benefit to FOSS to continue operating under this model, which is why FOSS is shifting away from licenses that permit leeching for profit.

    It’s no different to how corporations have worked to destroy the social contract, and do everything imaginable to evade taxes, offshore labor, corrupt our political systems, and not give back to the economies that incubated them and enabled their success — at some point you have to tell them to get fucked, stop being a fucking parasite, and pay their fair share… If they don’t give back and improve things for the majority, they don’t deserve to profit from it.








  • This is one of the major universal gaps in FOSS. I have a yearly reminder set to donate, and a list of projects within it — I do it this way because a) every project I’ve encountered only offer MONTHLY recurring, which is stupid as fuck because b) no I’m not fucking donating the $5 a month minimum to dozens of projects and c) larger donations usually have lower fees (e.g. donating $60 usually has lower fees than 12 x $5); why the fuck would I give the banks 30% more of my donation than necessary?

    Users shouldn’t have to manually deal with this shit, and valuable projects shouldn’t have to beg for pennies. There should be a FOSS payment management project that enables users to create an account, add ALL of the FOSS projects they use (or want to donate to), set a monthly / yearly contribution, and be done with it. Users can choose to allocate percentages or let the software divide the money between all of them evenly, including all of their FOSS dependencies.



  • MAD is only a nuclear deterrent. Unless/until someone uses a nuclear weapon, WW3 would be a conventional war, like Ukraine. If Putin were to start invading NATO countries, the response from NATO would be conventional — nobody who isn’t insane and suicidal would choose to launch nukes, unless they genuinely believed that they are being nuked (which makes nuclear terrorism a real existential threat).

    What MAD means is nuclear powers are unlikely to be physically invaded, especially in areas of known nuclear weapon installations — a nuclear power believing it is facing imminent defeat, or nuclear attack, is most likely to use them; dictators like Putin are sociopathic enough to take the entire species with them.








  • Various automations, conveniences, and efficiencies that can ultimately save a lot of time &/or money.

    1 ) sleep hygiene = a) close the roller shutters or blackout blinds at night b) open them gradually at the same time every day, play the tron soundtrack, and start brewing my coffee. c) drop the temperature by x degrees 1 hour before bedtime.

    2 ) house can start growing mould under certain conditions = run the dehumidifier after x amount of time above y average humidity.

    3 ) energy efficiency = a) when weather is predicted to rise above 25c, close roller shutters on sunny side of house. b) when temperature is rises above x, or drops below y, turn on air con.

    4 ) security = encrypt and upload security camera footage every 5 minutes.

    Etc, etc, etc. None of the above should be difficult to set up, nor insecure… We shouldn’t need to go to great lengths to automate our lives for comfort and convenience without our privacy being invaded… but in the age of surveillance capitalism, where corporations are scrambling to monetise everything we say and do, and most hardware and software vendors are actively working against us, our only solution is to tinker, hack, and patch together a multitude of disparate software and systems. Problem solving can be fun, but I’d prefer home automation to be easy and effortless.