queerlilhayseed

Thank you to all geo-politically educated mods on all instances, for keeping my feeds relatively free of US/western propagandist echo-chamber warriors.

You’d think inside your own echo chamber you’d be able to hear yourself.

That’s fair. I’m not trying to suggest that software development makes one uniquely capable of understanding complex systems, or complexity generally; more that the work tends to involve injecting more and more complexity into systems until they’re tottering under their own weight, as the Web is doing now. Managing that complexity ramp (or more often, failing to do so) is a part of maintaining software, and devs should be familiar with the prospect of a project that has morphed into something beyond their expectations.

Compared with whom? Complexity in general is a rather elusive concept, and since its effects on software are (usually) cumulative over multiple years, devs working in systems that reward quarterly or annual performance metrics are incentivized to ignore it. I don’t think ignoring complexity because your job compels you to is the same as not understanding it.

Most of the devs I’ve worked with grasp the theory of complexity fairly easily once it’s been explained to them, but tend to underestimate their own ability to manage it because they don’t account for how their scrum-addled environment impacts the quality of the code they write. They just look on the tangled mess they’ve wrought and assume the fault is individual, not systemic.

Software developers, of all people, should be used to the idea of complex projects not turning out quite the way they envisioned them. We’re still building the World Wide Web, and the Fediverse is part of it. I don’t even think we can call it a proper 1.0 version until every person has access to it, and we’re still quite a ways out from that. After we hit that milestone, there will still be an avalanche of maintenance and QoL improvement work to do. I don’t think the Web is something we’ll finish building anytime soon, if ever.

That’s a feature. every instance gets to set and enforce their own rules. The users get to decide which communities (and their attendant rules and admins) they participate in. Humans don’t suddenly become more immune to the follies of power, but power is more distributed and (so far) are less likely to be captured by monied interests.

If you’re waiting for humans to suddenly stop falling for the temptation to abuse of power, I think you’ll be waiting a while. I think it’s a significant improvement on the centralized corporate model.

I think it’s a combination of things. One, they are good at synthesizing huge amounts of data and detecting trends, which is useful for surveillance if you’re not that hung up on being exactly right all the time. Two, they are very energy-costly, so their use drives up the price of energy, which drives up the price of fossil fuels.