Readit News logoReadit News
bdavisx commented on Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down   bsky.social/about/blog/03... · Posted by u/minimaxir
RIMR · 3 days ago
To be honest, I was never entirely on board with Jay's almost exclusively cryptocurrency background. I think she's done an acceptable job as CEO, but I have also felt that leadership at Bluesky was never good enough to see legitimate success.

Today, Bluesky remains largely undermoderated and they have managed to bake in more toxic features Twitter ever did in such a short timespan. Its success is largely driven by having a UI closer to Twitter's original UI than any other alternative, and taking a stronger stance against far-right rhetoric than Twitter.

The only technical saving grace is the broad control you can take over the algorithm to avoid the content you don't want to see, but Bluesky is generally covered with more calls for violence than their nascent content team could ever actually deal with.

And I have yet to actually see a real use of ATproto that isn't just immediately blown out of the water by ActivityPub.

But I digress, the new CEO pretty much hammers that final nail in the coffin for me. I have zero belief in Bluesky to be anything but another awful corporate corner of the web that I should avoid.

bdavisx · 2 days ago
> they have managed to bake in more toxic features Twitter ever did in such a short timespan.

Not arguing, just curious - what toxic features are you talking about?

bdavisx commented on Something is afoot in the land of Qwen   simonwillison.net/2026/Ma... · Posted by u/simonw
fc417fc802 · 8 days ago
I agree that particular example is reprehensible.

I never claimed to condone the actions of the current admin. The examples of people being deported for protesting that I am familiar with are student visa holders. While I don't personally support the examples that I am aware of, I also recognize that in those specific cases the executive branch appears to be within the bounds of the law. I don't even object to the executive branch having the power to cancel the visas of political dissidents in the general case, merely to how they are choosing to apply it.

It's surprising to me to learn that a green card could be revoked for protected speech. That ought to fall well outside the bounds of the law IMO. Green cards and visas are entirely different things.

bdavisx · 7 days ago
>While I don't personally support the examples that I am aware of, I also recognize that in those specific cases the executive branch appears to be within the bounds of the law. I don't even object to the executive branch having the power to cancel the visas of political dissidents

It's my understanding that the 1st amendment applies to everyone, not just citizens. So if that's true (not 100% sure about that), how can political speech (protesting) be a valid reason to remove someone from the US?

bdavisx commented on Technical Excellence Is Not Enough   raccoon.land/posts/techni... · Posted by u/bo0tzz
raw_anon_1111 · 14 days ago
I hate seeing the idea that unionization is the answer. I grew up in South GA. Every single time that a corporation didn’t want to deal with a union, they just picked up and left.
bdavisx · 14 days ago
And if everywhere they went would do the same thing, then they wouldn't be able to leave. Too bad people have been convinced that unions are bad.
bdavisx commented on Why software stocks are getting pummelled   economist.com/business/20... · Posted by u/petethomas
lateforwork · a month ago
> The fear is that these [AI] tools are allowing companies to create much of the software they need themselves.

AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, secure, monitor, be on-call, support, handle incidents, and so on. That's very expensive. It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company.

bdavisx · a month ago
>It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company.

It's not that cut and dried - it all depends on what your company needs from SaaS and how big it is. SaaS companies like Salesforce don't charge a "small monthly fee" - they charge 10s of millions of dollars per month for large corporations. It's not hard at all to push that money towards AI development and have a better solution built in-house now. Yes, it still takes serious project management skills, but so does integrating Salesforce or other large SaaS software.

bdavisx commented on The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala   scala-lang.org/blog/2026/... · Posted by u/bishabosha
ecshafer · a month ago
Scala isn't as hot as it used to be. I think the rough Scala 2->3 transition, coupled with improvements in the base Java language, emergence of Kotlin + Android support, and popularity of Python in data science and data pipelines (lets just do everything in one language became popular) kind of made Scala not quite as popular as it could have been. Plus the long compile times are a pain. However it seems to have a really high coolness ratio for a language. The few jobs I do see in Scala are very cool looking. Very few boring looking jobs.
bdavisx · a month ago
I haven't used Scala for quite a while now - but a while back they had a serious asshole problem with a lot of the community.
bdavisx commented on Local Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home   buckscountybeacon.com/202... · Posted by u/mooreds
tunesmith · 2 months ago
parent poster is saying a healthy newsroom is much better than one guy. You're disagreeing by saying one guy is not better than an unhealthy newsroom.
bdavisx · 2 months ago
I don't want to nitpick, but they didn't say "healthy", and I think the current situation wrt news ownership should be called out at every opportunity, because not everyone is aware of it.
bdavisx commented on Local Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home   buckscountybeacon.com/202... · Posted by u/mooreds
CodingJeebus · 2 months ago
I think this is great, and I'm glad to hear that there are people out there doing this kind of work.

The main thing you need to watch out for in this kind of situation is corruption of the news filtering process on the local level. It's much easier to successfully bribe/coerce/undermine a single individual running an independent newsletter like this than it is an entire newsroom. Editors are helpful for vetting sources, providing guidance on how to follow up on leads, etc.

bdavisx · 2 months ago
>It's much easier to successfully bribe/coerce/undermine a single individual running an independent newsletter like this than it is an entire newsroom.

Except the problem in the US now is that newspapers are owned by corporations that own a bunch of newspapers, or very rich individuals/families - and a single individual can dictate what an entire newsroom says.

I don't see much of a difference when it comes to corruptibility.

bdavisx commented on The U.S. Government Just Followed Through on Its Ban of DJI Drones   popularmechanics.com/tech... · Posted by u/DamnInteresting
Kapura · 2 months ago
These things are true, but they don't explain why the u.s. government would make it a priority to ban such technologies. saying "well, republicans are bad so they do bad things" robs us the ability to understand the world.
bdavisx · 2 months ago
The problem with your statement is there's no way to know - the reality is it could have been a bribe or lack of a bribe; it could have been an actual foreign policy decision based on facts; or some other reason. It's not hard to come up with reasons why it was done, but with this administration there's no way to know whatsoever unless you actually know someone on the inside.
bdavisx commented on US will now review H-1B applicants' social media – require them to make public   businessinsider.com/us-to... · Posted by u/JKCalhoun
dmitrygr · 3 months ago
A country may vet entrants according to any criteria it chooses, just like I may enforce any limits I wish unto who may enter my house. If the criteria are too egregious for the gain the applicants might get by being in that country, the talented immigrants who have options may go elsewhere and the country may need relax the criteria to recapture the market for bright minds.
bdavisx · 3 months ago
I don't think anyone would argue with that - the problem here is that the requirements are being changed thru a process that involves no public or congressional input.

The other issue is that the vetting will likely not just look for terroristic or other 'illegal' social media content - it will look for whatever the administration decides to look for - again without oversight.

bdavisx commented on Why I stopped using JSON for my APIs   aloisdeniel.com/blog/bett... · Posted by u/barremian
duped · 3 months ago
Print debugging is fine and all but I find that it pays massive dividends to learn how to use a debugger and actually inspect the values in scope rather than guessing which are worth printing. It also is useless when you need to debug a currently running system and can't change the code.

And since you need to translate it anyway, there's not much benefit in my mind to using something like msgpack which is more compact and self describing, you just need a decoder to convert to json when you display it.

bdavisx · 3 months ago
Debuggers are great when you can use them. Where I work (financial/insurance) we are not allowed to debug on production servers. I would guess that's true in a lot of high security environments.

So the skill of knowing how to "println" debug is still very useful.

u/bdavisx

KarmaCake day943June 6, 2012View Original