TL;DR: I'm not a programmer. I'm a sysadmin with a dream: a distributed forum database with no owner, no single point of failure, client-side filtering (like VLANs for content), and optional Nostr/ZeroNet/Atlas transport.

What exists: database replicated across nodes, each node chooses what to store and what filters to apply. Moderation = subscribing to trusted filters. No crypto required.

What I need: reality check, technical feasibility analysis, database schema advice, prototype devs (PHP/Go/Rust), testers.

What I offer: small budget ($100-200/mo for specific tasks), domain/hosting funding, endless gratitude.

Full article (detailed, 8000+ words, includes philosophy and use cases): https://write.as/zyhlc76pi2op3.md

Please be brutal. I can take it.

Every time a developer gets told to ship a dark pattern, an addictive notification loop, or a feature that erodes user privacy, they face an impossible choice: push back and risk your job, or comply and sleep at night knowing what you built.

The discourse around surveillance capitalism almost always targets the executives signing off on these decisions, but the actual machinery runs on the labor of thousands of developers who had no seat at the strategy table.

We need to stop treating individual tech workers as innocent bystanders while simultaneously ignoring the power asymmetry that makes meaningful resistance career suicide for most people.

Unions in tech are not just about wages - they are one of the few structures that could give developers enough collective power to say no to harmful features without facing individual retribution.

Ask yourself: when was the last time you blamed a construction worker for building a building designed to trap the poor, rather than the system that designed and commissioned it?

The same moral clarity we apply to other forms of labor should apply here.

#TechWorkers #SurveillanceCapitalism #LaborRights #SoftwareEngineering

Every time a tech company announces they're rolling out AI code generation to 'free developers up for higher-level work', ask yourself: whose productivity is actually being optimized here?

These tools are sold bottom-up to developers but bought top-down by executives who see headcount as a cost to minimize. The pitch to management isn't 'your engineers will write better code' — it's 'you can do more with fewer people'. That's the actual value proposition.

Meanwhile, experienced developers get quietly hollowed out. Why hire a senior who knows systems design when an AI can 'assist' a junior through the same motions? The institutional knowledge walks out the door the moment senior engineers get replaced or driven out, and it gets embedded into a proprietary model that the company controls. You didn't build that knowledge base — you performed labor that trained someone else's product.

Junior devs don't get elevated. They get bypassed. Writing code from scratch is how you learn to think about code. When an AI fills in the boilerplate, generates the implementations, writes the tests, the apprentice never develops the muscle memory they needed to eventually do the real work. We end up with a generation of developers who can prompt well but can't actually build.

And let's talk about the open source angle, because this is where it gets genuinely sinister. These AI models are trained on publicly available code — including GPL projects whose licenses explicitly state that derivative works must be open source. Training a proprietary model on GPL code and closing the outputs? That's not a gray area. That's a license violation, but the copyright holders don't have the resources to fight billion-dollar companies in court.

So we get: workers deskilled, knowledge monopolized, copyright flouted, and all the productivity gains captured by shareholders. But hey, your standup notes are automated now.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45047387

Title...

I'm kinda disgusted with Microsoft and Github has been declining into an AI-Centric hellhole, to the point my recommendations are almost exclusively AI related... And let's not forget, the new Copilot Training enabled by default (which honestly, how do you get rid of this thing, VSCode also feels intrusive with AI-First bullshittery)

I've been wondering about moving to Gitlab but.... "Finally, AI for the entire software lifecycle." is literally plastered in the landing page. So.. that feels like a no-go.

Codeberg is very decent, it's based on Forgejo so ActivityPub is also a thing (but is cross-instance contributions possible?) but it's exclusive for Source-Available and Free Projects, which, by all means, totally fine! Half of my "active" projects are for free, and are open source (does that make them FOSS even though I'm basically the only dev?)

And last but not least, Forgejo and Gitlab themselves are self-hostable, but...how expensive (price and storage) would it be to self host a Git Forge??

And maybe I'm being narrow-sighted... For FOSS projects in Github, sadly I'll have no choice but to contribute there, if that's the only place where the project resides, same for Gitlab, and Codeberg* (unless cross-instance contrib is a thing)

For now, I'm thinking of moving FOSS/OSS projects to Codeberg, but for personal projects? What are some good options?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/45214693

Also vm repo

I have a small Yocto Linux-based embedded device with a main application - a kind of scientific measurement system - written in C++.

I want to add a WebUI to it which shows status / errors, a few graphs, and some basic controls (like restart). That is a relatively new task for me.

What do you think are good / creative ways of making such a web UI?

C++ feels like the wrong tool here.

What I am thinking of is something like:

• storing some data in LMDB or SQLite
• storing status and controls from the main process (written in C++) in a mmap'ed shared memory file
• writing the UI in a lightweight script language which can read the file, and generate the output. Python is likely too heavy, and to difficult to build. What is possible is micropython, possibly also Rust. What I'd like most would be to use a program written in Guile, which has nice facilities to server web requests.

What ideas do you have? Which extra points might I want to consider?

The 6.11 release for Qt Framework is now available, with improved performance, newly supported techniques and capabilities on graphics, connectivity and languages, not to mention a whole new approach to asynchronous C++ coding.

• Hardware-Accelerated 2D Rendering: A new module, Qt Canvas Painter, based on the HTML Canvas 2D Context, provides performance & productivity gains.
• 3D Improvements: New rendering techniques Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI) as an option for lightmap baking, and Screen Space Reflections (SSR). Also imrovements on the Temporal Anti-aliasing algorithm with motion vectors. New user-defined render passes for post-processing effects, color picking, layer masks, etc. directly in QML.
• Interactive Graphs: You can now implement custom graphs where a user-defined delegate renders each data point. There's a new Qt example, the Wind Turbine Dashboard, and many improvements, e.g. new ways to style line graphs, and multi-axis support on 3D graphs.
• Declarative Approach to C++: Qt Task Tree brings a whole new approach to asynchronous coding and C++ API design in Qt. In addition, various APIs have been unified to allow adapting any asynchronous task to work with the new module.
• Other Improvements: Improvements on vector graphics, controls, and accessibility. Connecting to web servicers is now easier with the new module, Qt OpenAPI. Navigating in an IDE between QML and C++, and making data available from C++ backend code to Qt Quick have gotten easier. A wealth of other improvements, such as for multimedia, Android, and API documentation.

Not sure if it’s just me, but I’ve been running into this quite a bit.

My client conversations are spread across different messaging platforms, and sometimes important or more detailed discussions just get buried or overlooked.

It’s not even about the number of messages, it’s the fragmentation that makes it hard to keep track of everything in one flow.

Anyone else dealing with this? How are you keeping track of conversations without things slipping through?