November is actively enrolled in a collegiate program and seeking a career in fake pig science. Seriously she’s doing criminology lol.

No you don’t. This is me IRL now:

I have such sights to show you on the borders of sensation (pain, anger, frustration, mechanical keyboards).

But seriously tho, it’s a thankless job that drives you insane. My experience differs from yours most likely in that I was already predisposed to this insanity. I figured out how to sell myself. I am very sensitive to corporate politics because I often find myself in vulnerable positions (startups, tooling and platform teams). I don’t really chase huge bumps in pay because I don’t want to stand out on the P&Ls. I’m also fairly insulated in my personal life (no kids, live below my means, etc) so that I am well equipped for these fights and more well equipped if I ever lose.

Honestly most companies believe they are looking for me, but I’ve found that not to be the case. They simply believe someone with my qualifications will prove that they’re right in terms of how they do things. It’s a hard thing politically.

That and my real job is talking to morons and cleanup. I wrote a data modeling system for typescript from scratch last year so that we could actually manage a eternal data registry (which is part of our goals). It auto-generates TS Types, Factories, Typeguards, Validators etc. I also had to ask for 2 months extension from some senior execs, because I couldn’t upload a file and the team that owns the file management service is under resourced and underutilized. Guess how much management time each project took up? Data modeling system? comparable to IC reporting hours over 2 months. File Upload? A week and a half.

And how do you expect to build a design system without some kind of task tracking or governance process?

Business does not actually govern according to anything but profits. Product is highly aligned with business goals at the majority of places because they often have the same metrics breakdown of the problem, marketability = features, features = money, new features = recurring revenue from subscriptions. Product managers going against business is often a sign of a toxic company or a misalignment in strategy/market position/expectations. Enterprise features = durable recurring revenue.

I usually advocate for increasing the scope of governance decisions to include production stakeholders (not just tech, but design and other production functions depending on industry I’m in) to achieve economies of scale for systems. The reality is the governance process at most places is nonexistent, and is solely a managerial function. The reason that leadership is split into technical and managerial in most modern tech companies is to consecrate governance power. We’re told to as tech dweebs who cannot commune with the scam that is stock companies that we need to “manage up” instead.

I’m not against ticket tracking. I’m against the corpo culture where process is used as a soft power against people who are only treated with respect because the relation of their job to the market that leads to micromanagement and worse financial outcomes anyway.

Enterprise sales is a death knell for so many software teams because it disconnects the payer from the user. Meaning recurring revenue from sales to the same user aren’t an organic process of conversion based on good software, they are a managed process of procurement. It creates a bad product and a bad set of incentives that ends up undercutting the original value prop. This happens bright as day within our own industry with our own tooling. Things like Jira, Trello, DataDog, AWS, tableau, looker, etc. I have a friend who’s in the data science space with purchasing power and they change tooling every 2 years because as companies ramp up to the enterprise sales pipeline they stop maintaining the core offering as well and things get slow. Tableau and Looker are perfect examples that I’ve personally seen completely hollow out in my life time.

Certainly it’s an issue how product people get to control these mm processes but that’s an implementation thing.

This is the agile version of real (capitalism/communism/socialsm) hasn’t ever been tried. Not only are processes picked by their susceptibility to managerial meddling, but managerial meddling is a feature. That’s why nobody uses XP and everyone uses scrum. That’s why companies where there’s push-back on mid sprint re-prioritization and waste go to kanban. These systems are ultimately products and are sold as such to management. That’s why SAFe is getting incredibly popular in enterprise despite being overwrought garbage that cuts its own legs out from under it, and is more waterfall in design than the average scrum implementation.

I’ve only started working with bootcampers post 2021. I’ve seen trash code/design/architecture mainly from college educated SWE’s.

I have no problem with designers. They have a real job and the best of them make really great interfaces. It’s a really difficult skill. They are a parallel work capacity to me. Most of the time most software has really bad UI/UX because designers are treated even worse than us at companies that have been financialized to the hilt. I’ve been at several places that have fired designers only to have to rehire them again.

I know I make programmer interfaces. Designers help refine those to something simpler and more usable. I actually have had multiple talks to designers at multiple companies saying how we needed to push for a unified product style guide + component theme to standardize the visual language and design. This helps lighten everyone’s load because it makes time for building important shit on both sides. It’s so hard to explain to business how valuable it is to have a process for building a durable library off the shelf components.

The chilling effect this causes will make communities even more like echo-chambers, as dissent will be pre-emptively squashed.

If only there was a tool that allowed you to host an instance on a federated network that allowed you to make your own community and control how the rest of the network can interact with it. Why has nobody built this???

Curious about this if you can expand upon it without doxxing yourself.

Often software success is measured by adoption. Let’s say tomorrow a turn key persona management system existed.

The most institutionalized levels of success possible is to be coopted by and contract out to an intelligence service (immediate pass, even the attention, immediate pass). However that means that such a system must unknowingly solve the problems of:

1. the features that are absolutely required for said service
2. the ease of migration of operations onto said service
3. be completely self evident to many at that service to be an answer for their problems
4. be a person that they could feel they could trust or manipulate into control

Very unlikely.

Another level of success is adoption in the general ecosystem. So now the DSA’s, PSL’s of the world can run persona management easily. Not really a big socialism success given you literally said it yourself it’s a tool that if proliferated creates a “broad distrust of social media”.

So who are gonna be the biggest users of such a tool? Open your phone and look at your texts. That’s right the people who are shaking down grandparents, the people who are pretending to be a rich celebrity that has taken an interest in a lonely isolated person living in a rural community, scammers, flim flam artists, NFT enthusiasts, crypto bros.

The problem is that there is already a “broad distrust of social media”, that doesn’t stop humanity from using the communication tool, and that doesn’t lower the total incidences of exploitation that happen.

If I had an implementation of “a turnkey internet nuke”, I’d be booking a flight to Beijing before releasing it on the open internet

Lol China would not have you. This is a movie plot. They don’t want guys who make “rocking the boat technology” at all. You think they’d want some OSS enthusiasts running experiments with apes commenting on the net in their green zone? They have their own versions. They have their own trusted operators. This is like adoption with any other intelligence service.

In general the problem with this technology is literally like nukes. It shouldn’t exist. It’s easier to make social systems without its existence. This tech doesn’t change anything, it makes a better integrated version of desperate components of an existing system.

If tomorrow at the same time everyone woke up with a turnkey nuclear bomb, Israel would pre-emptively nuke Gaza.

come around on social programs.

Wat.

Anarchists are the ones who are consistently making social programs from scratch. Direct action is and has always been about feeding people as well as sabotaging bulldozers.

https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/

Strongly agree that something like this is needed. However, what enables the asymmetry here is a limitation on material resources and labor. No such limitation exists with digital systems that cannot be trivially copied and deployed by bourgeois interests.

Only idea I have for something like this is a system that requires user verification by existing members, possibly gatekept by irl meetings and capped at some rate per user. Few people use the fediverse because of tiny barriers to entry. No one would tolerate a system that imposes more burdens.

DDoS prevention solutions are probably capable of thwarting most technological solutions we can come up with to create our own asymmetries.

The root of your perception here is correct, the bourgeoisie will always have “promoted posts” for their personal interests, but that is no different than any censor or editor that exists today.

You are also correct in the economies of scale, my point is that we have always been playing catch up and these tools allow us to catch up significantly as well. These tools raise our capability floor to heights that were not possible before.

Do you have any specific knowledge on the characteristics, capabilities, or implementation of these? I would be very interested in learning more.

Pega and Capado are the advertising ones. Sock puppet is a commercial offering targetted at OSINT, “to protect researcher identities”.

The knowledge we have of the US government ones are from things like Operation Earnest Voice where they contracted out development to Ntrepid.

Most software out there isn’t a highly capable consistent package. I’m sure the CIA or Palantir has one developed, but a lot of places just run developer tooling like Playwright to control Chrome. Prior to LLM’s any procedural text generation was done via Markov Chains and sentiment analysis thru keyword analysis (e.g. regex).

There are some OSS tools out there in various states of quality like:

• https://github.com/dimensi0n/persona
• https://github.com/malwaredojo/loki

I did a whole bunch of research on this as I thought it would be a fun challenge to build one, I wanted to make it OSS, but I decided against it after I generally thought about what “success” would look like, I was basically thinking of building a turnkey internet nuke.

Typically your keywords are “persona management”, “sock puppet tools” etc.

Posting internet comments is the one form of media that proletarians can easily participate in to reach the masses without outright gatekeeping by an editor

Be for real lol. You’re posting on one of the only places on the internet that isn’t completely owned by the bourgeoisie. Your reach is already limited by segregating yourself on this site. Pretending that posting on “the internet” (e.g. the biggest sites) which is mostly controlled by gigantic bourgeoisie interests and petite bourgeoisie interests is a purely proletarian act is silly. In practice “freedom to post” is ancillary to feeding you advertising. You are playing in their sandbox and have always been. The enshittification of the 2010’s blurred the lines between content and advertising intentionally because the smallest advertisers who refused to pay for ads already started doing that in the late 2000’s.

This creates an asymmetrical playing field where corporations and NED orgs can spend lots of money on GPU farms to push their messages, but prole groups cannot nearly as easily.

You’re just competing over different resources. Prior to the mechanization of this through any software you were competing for bodies doing the posting (whether the medium was internet, newspapers, leaflets, pamphlets, word of mouth etc doesn’t matter). With augmented mechanization prior to AI you were competing for bodies and compute. Now you can argue you mainly compete over compute. However because of the fun logic of capitalism, in the current state of capitalist organization proletarians can afford compute more than they can afford to feed other proletarians amortized over time. So this really only boils down to “humans are becoming obsolete in the posting wars”, which was already true.

The inherent contradictions in capitalism make it effectively impossible for this technology to be really gate kept from proles over time without a literal crackdown on ownership or development. The cat is so out of the bag there’d be a civil war if the bourgeoisie started drawing lines on who can own what things for the “greater good”. The US could not even keep a lid on encryption software over time, despite export controls for encryption still being a thing.

So even if we built ourselves a life raft with the fediverse / Lemmy, we are still trivially subject to large scale influence operations, even if less valuable as a target. It seems like big tech is aware of efforts to avoid corporate control over public opinion

This was already true before 2020. The type of software that major botnets/intelligence services/ad companies specializing in guerilla advertising is called a Persona Management System. These systems mechanized the dissemination of posting and conversation shaping across the internet. It has only really been in the last 8 years that Persona Management has been a thing that exists outside of intelligence adjacent circles.

What AI does is it makes running / developing Persona Management Systems easier. You no longer have to make a cohesive overarching strategy to make things feel organic for humans, you can simply be “good enough” with AI and that’s always what these systems campaigns aim for.

Don’t get me wrong this is an acceleration, but it’s not an acceleration that brings us to a “brave new world”. Yes the owners have new toys, but they haven’t been able to prevent us from using them. Likewise if this was a real “information war”, this becomes a war of logistics like every other war. It becomes necessary for proles to find a tactic that allows them to make the equivalent of a Hamas piss rocket or a Quds drone, something that is incredibly cheap but because of the capitalist state of the world requires a wasteful amount money to defend against. For every dollar in prole spend we make them spend $1,000 against it.

Smaller sites are already protecting themselves using proof of work systems like anubis to prevent AI crawling. Anubis is a great example of making them pay more. If Hexbear/Lemmy implemented anubis, it would be a slight annoyance for us an extra 1-2s browsing. However for an AI crawler running at scale to “take over the community” it would create a significant financial disadvantage because at scale the costs for running a hashcash for every interaction would balloon.

This isn’t even new for reddit. They seeded the original site back during the 2005-2007 years by paying people to run sockpuppets to simulate the network effect. They’d post about tech before, the subject matter they’re posting now is a level of degeneracy that only comes with an IPO.