• 2 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: May 28th, 2024

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  • My point isn’t actually about the software.

    Agile is a limited form of workplace democracy that succeeded because the usual forms of disciplining workers couldn’t be enforced to stop it. It’s taken off in software because the outlay for software is so low that people can just quit their jobs and start a rival project with preferable working conditions. It’s stuck around because it’s significantly more effective than dictat.

    I have problems with agile too. A lot of the “ceremonies” seem more like cult rituals and bad practices are often assumed to be self justifying when they should be interrogated. (I once had a bust up in the office because I insisted in creating a future proof test framework instead of writing just what’s needed at the time. I was overruled and I’m still mad about it).

    So I guess my point isn’t even about the specific agile practices either.

    The point is that workers are able to self manage when they’re allowed to, and agile has accidentally proven this to be the case. Other work places should adopt some of these ideas. And these ideas should be pushed further, into business decisions and HR and management. And physical communities etc. all the way up to actual government.




  • What is impact engineering though? If it’s it’s just agile while being cognisant of technical debt over MVPs, I don’t know if it’s necessarily that different.

    It seems the study was designed to sell a book and I can’t find anything about what that book says. I should probably read it but the bait way it’s being sold makes me resistant to paying to find out.



  • It’s half way to self management.

    Software exists in a world that kind of exists outside of property. Cynics like to think that Agile got big because as some kind of fad because the kids love it, but the reality is that fully hierarchical models just cannot keep up with self organising teams.

    The old model - the model that most of the rest of the world of work still uses - simply cannot compete on a level playing field where the means of production (a cheap computer) are available to all. A landowner can stop you building your own house, but Microsoft can’t really stop you building your own software, so they still have to put in work to collect rent.

    Imagine what we could accomplish as a species if the goals and distribution of resources were also decided democratically.









  • I don’t know what that post is about. It’s not possible to change the contents of a torrent. The torrent file itself is a list of checksums which validate byte ranges within the files being downloaded. If a client downloads a poisoned piece, it discards it and deprioritises the seed it got it from. Perhaps they’re transcoding a file, whilst still seeding the original.

    Torrents can work as a CDN for static files, because the downloader has to validate that the file is the same one as on the server using the checksums in the torrent file.




  • I think something like peertube would be a good solution for media, but there’s obstacles to getting it deployed in terms of adoption.

    The player is quite mature and does everything you could want. For servers it saves resources by being peer to peer using webRTC. For clients it handles graceful degradation and redundancy.

    A way it could be implemented for other drivers servers could go like this…

    I upload a video to Lemmy. My Lemmy instance forwards that video to peertube. Peertube processes the video and releases it as unlisted. Peertube sends the URL back to my Lemmy instance. Lemmy publishes my post with the peertube player iframe as a video.

    The issues with this are getting app developers and instance owners to adopt the changes and getting users to understand the implications of the P2P aspect.


  • I don’t know if this something you’re deliberately trying to avoid. Apologies if you are, and I’ve missed the point, but

    I gave up on doing anything in TK years ago. For all the effort to make stuff work in it, you might as well just use flask and have a HTML frontend. That way, you know it’s going to work on everything and includes remote access as a bonus.

    Edit: for a lot more power with a little bit more learning curve, look at fastapi.