What the actual fuck?
Most of my working adult life has involved struggling with untreated ADHD. It's one of those things that a lot of people failed to understand, and when I'd explain my symptoms to them, they would often just say that it sounded like I was depressed, burnt out, and overburdened at work. While all of those things were true, executive dysfunction is more complicated and nuanced - for me, it manifests in the form of procrastination, seeking stimulation, and difficulty carrying a thread of consciousness from one sentence to the next. It can also mean that your self-esteem is constantly in the toilet.
In spite of this, I had a lot of success in early stage tech startups, which are often chaotic. You have to switch roles at a moment's notice, going from customer support and technical resolution to product development and logistics. When things are on fire, customers are angry, and things are broken, I tend to be at my very best. It's the slower, more tedious, repetitive tasks like manual data entry that I tend to struggle with. I have been forced onto Performance Improvement Plans more than a few times in my career - despite glowing performance reviews - and have never gotten off of one.
In spite of dropping out of college, I had managed to make a career for myself. I worked at a few tech startups, and had a really good reputation among my team members. As I continued to climb a corporate ladder and move to bigger and bigger companies, I found myself becoming burdened with larger responsibilities. I can accomplish anything I set my mind to, but I gradually turned myself into a workhorse for the entire team. My manager eventually saddled me with an enormous task where I had to develop a deeply technical presentation from scratch and give it to a live audience of over 300 engineers. To be clear - no such resource had ever been developed within the company. I guess this stemmed from me rewriting so much of the documentation so that ordinary people could understand it?
I did the best I could. I solicited advice from just about every department in the company, rewrote the whole thing several times over, and practiced my presentation in front of my manager over and over again, as they nitpicked every aspect of it. Presentation day finally came, it ended up being a huge success. For me, this was a massive accomplishment. Unfortunately, my work performance had been languishing in other areas, and I once again ended up on a PIP. My manager drove the team into the ground, and I tried to make the case that I was just about done with being treated this way.
I ended up in an HR meeting that I thought was initially being done to hash out our differences and find a path forward, but it was actually just the company kicking me out. I got a severance package, struggled for months to apply for a new job, faced a ton of rejections and self-sabotage. I smoked pot and got drunk until I had to sell all of my belongings just to survive, and then had to move back across the country to live with my dad and apply for the military. Four years later, I'm married, going to school full-time, and living a pretty okay life as a veteran.
Regardless of how you feel about it, it's still notable that people on the Fediverse managed to scrape $500k together. This is the first time something like that has ever happened on this network. In the world of big politics and presidential campaigns, it's not much. However, within the scope of grassroots organizing, it's substantial.
I agree that I would love to see that funding go towards mutual aid, infra and project funding, and supporting people who work on different parts of the network.
He is a bit bombastic, and has a habit of biting off more than he can chew sometimes. I think these side-projects are ultimately useful, though, and probably help fend off boredom or burnout. Maybe he gets better at coding and design through doing that, I dunno.
Regardless, he's continues to do a lot of great development work.
So, to be clear, the story the article links to is specifically a case of local content that didn't actually federate. It was an accidental upload, he cancelled the post, it sat in storage, and even his admin was stumped about how to get it out.
I agree that with federation, it's a lot more messy. But, having provisions to delete things locally, and try to push out deletes across the network, is absolutely better than nothing.
The biggest issue I have is that there's really not much an admin can do at the moment if CSAM or some other horrific shit gets into pict-rs, short of using a tool to crawl through the database and use API calls to hackily delete things. Federation aside, at least make it easy for admins and mods to handle this on their home servers.
I don't think it was intentional, the dev seemed to be struggling with health-related problems and possibly burnout. But yeah, definitely a depressing moment for an otherwise really cool project.
I'm pretty sure they mean respective to themselves and their own walled garden, but it definitely doesn't scan well.
Did they, though? A bunch of other Fediverse platforms have supported this for literally years, to the point that Mastodon was the butt of jokes for breaking basic search functionality.
Having standard search that just works is a huge deal, and helps solve against the decentralized content discovery problem.
Nobody is telling you to use it. This originally spun out of development of a messaging app just for Pixelfed, but evolved when the dev realized it could be made to work with any Fediverse account, not just his own server project.
An optimistic view is that it could end up opening the door for end-to-end encryption to come to private messages in Fediverse servers, over time.
Just cross your arms, smile wryly, and comment on how pathetic the Interviewer's pen is. Cheap material, runny ink, a grip that's painful to hold. Wish him good luck in taking notes on subsequent interviews.
Then lean in, and say "But, you know? I've got a premium writing utensil. It's crafted in the Netherlands by a Space Age engineering firm. It's designed to fit comfortably between your fingers. And the Indian ink that runs through it glistens and glides smoothly through a specially crafted tip."
Pull out a business card with absolutely beautiful handwriting on it. Just as he expresses surprise and interest, sigh and say "But... It's really not for you. It's really more of a thing for your boss, or your boss's boss."
Start getting up to leave, and wait for him to come running after you.
Honestly, thank you for demonstrating a clear limitation of how things currently work. Lemmy (and Kbin) probably should look into internal rate limiting on posts to avoid this.
I'm a bit naive on the subject, but perhaps there's a way to detect "over x amount of votes from over x amount of users from this instance"? and basically invalidate them?
Yeah, I'm on sertraline and Adderall XR. While neither one is perfect, the baseline quality of my life has improved. It's hard to quantify or explain, but my recall and short-term memory is a million times better. I'm currently going to school full-time, and my grades are the best they've ever been, even in my hardest classes.