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Fanatical Deal Expires 2024-11-28 16:00

GameBillet has it for $6.17

Was looking through my old book marks when I came across this artist and reminded me of this community

They have a ton of neat stuff from consoles to birds

https://www.richardparrydesign.com/

Consider watching this video with FreeTube, a nifty open-source program that lets you watch YouTube videos without Google spying on your viewing habits!

Combined with Libredirect, which automatically opens youtube links in Freetube, it becomes really slick and effortless to use.

source: https://x.com/Palworld_EN/status/1861560568756462079#m

"We have data on the performance of >50k engineers from 100s of companies. ~9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing: Ghost Engineers.”

Last week, a tweet by Stanford researcher Yegor Denisov-Blanch went viral within Silicon Valley. “We have data on the performance of >50k engineers from 100s of companies,” he tweeted. “~9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing: Ghost Engineers.”

Denisov-Blanch said that tech companies have given his research team access to their internal code repositories (their internal, private Githubs, for example) and, for the last two years, he and his team have been running an algorithm against individual employees’ code. He said that this automated code review shows that nearly 10 percent of employees at the companies analyzed do essentially nothing, and are handsomely compensated for it. There are not many details about how his team’s review algorithm works in a paper about it, but it says that it attempts to answer the same questions a human reviewer might have about any specific segment of code, such as:

• “How difficult is the problem that this commit solves?
• How many hours would it take you to just write the code in this commit assuming you could fully focus on this task?
• How well structured is this source code relative to the previous commits? Quartile within this list
• How maintainable is this commit?”

Ghost Engineers, as determined by his algorithm, perform at less than 10 percent of the median software engineer (as in, they are measured as being 10 times worse/less productive than the median worker).

Denisov-Blanch wrote that tens of thousands of software engineers could be laid off and that companies could save billions of dollars by doing so. “It is insane that ~9.5 percent of software engineers do almost nothing while collecting paychecks,” Denisov-Blanch tweeted. “This unfairly burdens teams, wastes company resources, blocks jobs for others, and limits humanity’s progress. It has to stop.”

The Stanford research has not yet been published in any form outside of a few graphs Denisov-Blanch shared on Twitter. It has not been peer reviewed. But the fact that this sort of analysis is being done at all shows how much tech companies have become focused on the idea of “overemployment,” where people work multiple full-time jobs without the knowledge of their employers and its focus on getting workers to return to the office. Alongside Denisov-Blanch’s project, there has been an incredible amount of investment in worker surveillance tools. (Whether a ~9.5 percent rate of workers not being effective is high is hard to say; it's unclear what percentage of workers overall are ineffective, or what other industry's numbers look like).

Over the weekend, a post on the r/sysadmin subreddit went viral both there and on the r/overemployed subreddit. In that post, a worker said they had just sat through a sales pitch from an unnamed workplace surveillance AI company that purports to give employees “red flags” if their desktop sits idle for “more than 30-60 seconds,” which means “no ‘meaningful’ mouse and keyboard movement,” attempts to create “productivity graph” based on computer behavior, and pits workers against each other based on the time it takes to complete specific tasks. 

What is becoming clear is that companies are becoming obsessed with catching employees who are underperforming or who are functionally doing nothing at all, and, in a job market that has become much tougher for software engineers, are feeling emboldened to deploy new surveillance tactics. 

“In the past, engineers wielded a lot of power at companies. If you lost your engineers or their trust or demotivated the team—companies were scared shitless by this possibility,” Denisov-Blanch told 404 Media in a phone interview. “Companies looked at having 10-15 percent of engineers being unproductive as the cost of doing business.”

Denisov-Blanch and his colleagues published a paper in September outlining an “algorithmic model” for doing code reviews that essentially assess software engineer worker productivity. The paper claims that their algorithmic code assessment model “can estimate coding and implementation time with a high degree of accuracy,” essentially suggesting that it can judge worker performance as well as a human code reviewer can, but much more quickly and cheaply. 

I asked Denisov-Blanch if he thought his algorithm was scooping up people whose work contributions might not be able to be judged by code commits and code analysis alone. He said that he believes the algorithm has controlled for that, and that companies have told him specific workers who should be excluded from analysis because their job responsibilities extend beyond just pushing code. 

“Companies are very interested when we find these people [the ghost engineers] and we run it by them and say ‘it looks like this person is not doing a lot, how does that fit in with their job responsibilities?’” Denisov-Blanch said. “They have to launch a low-key investigation and sometimes they tell us ‘they’re fine,’ and we can exclude them. Other times, they’re very surprised.”

He said that the algorithm they have developed attempts to analyze code quality in addition to simply analyzing the number of commits (or code pushes) an engineer has made, because number of commits is already a well-known performance metric that can easily be gamed by pushing meaningless updates or pushing then reverting updates over and over. “Some people write empty lines of code and do commits that are meaningless,” he said. “You would think this would be caught during the annual review process, but apparently it isn’t. We started this research because there was no good way to use data in a scalable way that’s transparent and objective around your software engineering team.”

Much has been written about the rise of “overemployment” during the pandemic, where workers take on multiple full-time remote jobs and manage to juggle them. Some people have realized that they can do a passable enough job at work in just a few hours a day or less. 

“I have friends who do this. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence of people doing this for years and getting away with it. Working two, three, four hours a day and now there’s return-to-office mandates and they have to have their butt in a seat in an office for eight hours a day or so,” he said. “That may be where a lot of the friction with the return-to-office movement comes from, this notion that ‘I can’t work two jobs.’ I have friends, I call them at 11 am on a Wednesday and they’re sleeping, literally. I’m like, ‘Whoa, don’t you work in big tech?’ But nobody checks, and they’ve been doing that for years.”

Denisov-Blanch said that, with massive tech layoffs over the last few years and a more difficult job market, it is no longer the case that software engineers can quit or get laid off and get a new job making the same or more money almost immediately. Meta and X have famously done huge rounds of layoffs to its staff, and Elon Musk famously claimed that X didn’t need those employees to keep the company running. When I asked Denisov-Blanch if his algorithm was being used by any companies in Silicon Valley to help inform layoffs, he said: “I can’t specifically comment on whether we were or were not involved in layoffs [at any company] because we’re under strict privacy agreements.”

The company signup page for the research project, however, tells companies that the “benefits of participation” in the project are “Use the results to support decision-making in your organization. Potentially reduce costs. Gain granular visibility into the output of your engineering processes.”

Denisov-Blanch said that he believes “very tactile workplace surveillance, things like looking at keystrokes—people are going to game them, and it creates a low trust environment and a toxic culture.” He said with his research he is “trying to not do surveillance,” but said that he imagines a future where engineers are judged more like salespeople, who get commission or laid off based on performance. 

“Software engineering could be more like this, as long as the thing you’re building is not just counting lines or keystrokes,” he said. “With LLMs and AI, you can make it more meritocratic.”

Denisov-Blanch said he could not name any companies that are part of the study but said that since he posted his thread, “it has really resonated with people,” and that many more companies have reached out to him to sign up within the last few days.

Hi All,

Just a heads up that Hetzner (our server host) are performing maintenance that may affect access to the site.

More info is on their notice here: https://status.hetzner.com/incident/29972ed7-abac-4fa1-b4b5-26dd7efb356e

Hopefully downtime will be minimal (and I will be asleep during it!) but once they're done, the site should be accessible again.

As always you can check status.lemmy.zip (which isn't hosted on Hetzner!) to see more information on the site's status.

Thanks

Demigodrick

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s administration is urging Ukraine to quickly increase the size of its military by drafting more troops and revamping its mobilization laws to allow for the conscription of troops as young as 18.

A senior Biden administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private consultations, said Wednesday that the outgoing Democratic administration wants Ukraine to lower the mobilization age to 18 from the current age of 25 to help expand the pool of fighting-age men available to help a badly outnumbered Ukraine in its nearly three-year-old war with Russia.

The official said “the pure math” of Ukraine’s situation now is that it needs more troops in the fight.

When Hussam Abu Salameh received permission from the Israeli military to access the olive grove that has been in his family for generations, he decided to wait.

His land, located east of Jenin in the north of the occupied West Bank, is next to the separation wall, where he had previously been shot at by Israeli soldiers.

Not long after, a military truck reappeared and soldiers started shooting at Palestinians in their groves, despite the local council’s prior coordination with the Israeli army to allow farmers to pick olives near the wall that surrounds Faqqua from three sides.

“I took off my hat and started waving it to ask them to stop, but they continued firing live ammunition at us,” says Hussam. He took the olives his family had gathered to his tractor and was preparing to leave when he heard his wife calling out that she had been injured.

“We ran out to her and found that a bullet hit her in the chest. We carried her to my son’s car and called an ambulance,” says Hussam.

Mastodon.

Gaza needs 600 aid trucks per day to avert famine according to USAID. Biden asked Israel to let in 350.

You’ll find that pikas run and jump very quickly, so they can be difficult to capture on camera when moving! It may take some practice to be able to find them within your frame when they’re moving at this speed.

While I won't be going out to do wildlife photography myself, I thought it was nicely detailed + lots of great photos in the article body

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22528364

Steam store page

You may have seen my post trying to troubleshoot my server. It seems either the motherboard or CPU is dead, so hey, why not do an upgrade?

I use this server for a lot. It's used for a Jellyfin server, sometimes multiple streams at once. I think I'd like hardware transcoding, I want it to be really good at streaming Jellyfin, and preferably multiple streams at once without issue.

It's also going to be used for hosting Zusam, a kind of private forum for friends/family - a key thing is that this will also be transcoding videos and photos to downscale them (uses FFmpeg).

I also host Photoprism, which will be generating thumbnails and indexing photos.

In addition to this, I also host a bunch of other stuff, I think the key ones are Nextcloud AIO and PaperlessNGX (which does OCR) as these would be more demanding. Also the *arr stack. Then another 10 or so services that aren't too demanding and have low usage so are unlikely to be an issue outside of making sure I have enough RAM.

I use it as a backup server as well. It receives borg backups from other devices and backs up itself to a backup HDD, and does cloud backups, but has a fast LAN connection and decent internet speed (300Mbps) and this is scheduled overnight so probably doesn't affect anything.

I also use it for playing games with the kids! Normally Stardew Valley but sometimes more demanding games.

Many of the hosted services have family members also using them. I want to make sure I can do things like the Photoprism indexing and Zusam video downscaling while not affecting the experience using Jellyfin or other services. It's all good if this happens by limiting cores for transcoding. It would be nice to be able to use it for more demanding gaming as well, but I understand if it's a bit hard to keep everything going nicely with a demanding game running that doesn't limit its multithreading.

Possibly related for compatibility purposes:

• all my hard drives are 3.5" HDD or 2.5" SSD SATA connections. I have 2 SSDs and 2 HDDs.
• I also have a Radeon rx5700xt graphics card. Would be nice to be able to keep using this.
• I'm currently running a full desktop environment (Linux Mint - Cinnamon) on it, for the purposes of playing the games. So needs to work well with Linux and also play nicely with wireless Xbone controllers.
• Case is Mid sized. Specifically this one.

And the current CPU is an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, in case you want to tell me what I have is fine and I don't need an upgrade 🥲

What are some good options for an upgrade?

Can he download stuff like a regular hard drive where you get 256gb of space or is it like a cloud service or something?

https://mastodon.world/@exchgr/113555423580746348

I deem this as my own theory, The ThanksTubbs Theory.

(Sorry if this was cringe)

On November 22, 2024, Deno formally filed a petition with the USPTO to cancel Oracle’s trademark for “JavaScript.” This marks a pivotal step toward freeing “JavaScript” from legal entanglements and recognizing it as a shared public good.

Oracle has until January 4, 2025, to respond. If they fail to act, the case will go into default, and the trademark will likely be canceled.