• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The article is critical of GitLabs model, not celebrating it.

    What GitLab does is far more open than what you’ll see elsewhere, but the formula is actually pretty near to what most companies do already: Have pay bands for positions, and then a modifier based on the region, level factors, and some other inputs. Normally this produces a range, not a straight number, and then negotiations take place within that band (which is also why this information and formula is not typically shared).

    As for the idea of paying a flat salary for a position regardless of where the person works, that is simply a non-starter for most companies, and essentially creates a race to the bottom to locate the region of the world that will produce qualified workers for the lowest possible salary possible. We as a society have no problem seeing fast fashion or other manufacturing that do this as being exploitive and evil, and this model is exactly the kind of thinking that drives that behavior. If we stop caring about where a person lives and instead look only at salary vs production, we will only ever hire in the absolute lowest cost of living places in the world capable of producing acceptable workers.

    We need to look at this from another angle as well - Companies are buying labor, much in the same way that they buy raw materials, property, or utilities. When buying any of these inputs to your business, how do you decide how much to pay? Certainly you do not sit down in a board room and agree on a number and then go out into the world with that number and attempt to purchase what you need. You start by looking at what the going market rate for those inputs are. People, like materials, have some wiggle room in those numbers, and sometimes paying a little more will get you better quality or more reliability, so you will need to make decisions there to determine where on the spectrum you wish to fall, but never would you pay significantly more than market rate, nor would you be able to pay significantly below.

    I see this kind of discussion constantly in the last few years, and often in terms of tying inflation to annual salary increases. “If inflation was 10%, why is my annual raise only 5%?” - because overall inflation was 10%, but the inflation in the cost for a person that can do your job was only 5%. It’s truly and honestly that simple. You are a commodity item that goes to the highest bidder - act like it.






  • Most of the west has already been dealing with this for decades, and the way they typically deal with it is through offshore manufacturing and immigration. The process has been to identify a low cost nation, build up enough infrastructure to work from there, move manufacturing to that nation, and then when the nation becomes wealthier and no longer able to be exploited, restart the process. We’ve seen this cycle with India and China, and now it’s starting to branch out (a lot of South American nations are being bulked up as “near-shore” partners that are cheap, but also in the same timezone and closer for shipping). Africa is another continent with a lot of potential future options.



  • Title’s a little click-baity there. The Massachusetts ballot initiative that passed is a poorly thought out security nightmare, so until those issues can be addressed it would be dangerous to follow it.

    Now, according to Reuters, NHTSA has written to automakers to advise them not to comply with the Massachusetts law. Among its problems are the fact that someone “could utilize such open access to remotely command vehicles to operate dangerously, including attacking multiple vehicles concurrently,” and that “open access to vehicle manufacturers’ telematics offerings with the ability to remotely send commands allows for manipulation of systems on a vehicle, including safety-critical functions such as steering, acceleration, or braking.”

    The title isn’t wrong, it just doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means.





  • You’d have to have a hook - guaranteed performance or uptime. Maybe some niche feature set or enhancement.

    I think it’s similar to some of the other open source vendors out there that sell a service that they host, but do not actually own (even if they are one of the open source project contributors). You can’t get too greedy because the thing you sell can be sold by anyone, so you have to compete on price and “extras”. Not the easiest way to make money, but it’s not unheard of.


  • I expect that in time, that’s exactly what will happen. Some instance somewhere will offer guaranteed availability and performance for a monthly fee to it’s members. That feels icky at first blush, but why should it? It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but no one is forced to use that instance to be part of the larger community, and one instance can’t hold the community hostage like a single company social media company could. They’ll have success right up until they don’t and the Fediverse will sort it out through migrations of users and communities.


  • some of these hiccups are from the unpredictability of exodus traffic and its impact on the various servers.

    That’s been what I’ve been wondering as well - with all of the chaos and hiccups right now, maybe I did figure this out already, and things just a little tilted for the time being. Then I also wonder if some of what I think I figured out might also be that tilt and worry myself again.

    🤷Oh well - we’ll sort it out eventually 😆






  • The Venn diagram of lawyers that see this as good press for themselves and the lawyers that have the experience and record to work a case of this magnitude has an exceedingly slim overlapping area at this point. We’ve seen very good lawyers come and go from his team when he seemed eccentric but able to be represented and as that veil lifted the talent pool has shrunk. I’m not ragging on the people that agree to represent him - no matter the person or crime, they are entitled to competent representation and someone has to do it - but several of them have just been completely out of their depth.


  • This looks a likely a big part of it, and then we also have reports from MSNBC that at least some of the evidence being presented against him came from one of his lawyers. It could have been a former lawyer and not one of the two that recently resigned, but if it was one of these two they would have to resign or risk personal legal consequences.

    Trump seems to have taken the view that plotting illegal things with his lawyer is smart due to attorney client confidentiality (see Cohen), not understanding that confidentiality specifically does not protect discussions related to new crimes. No one can force your attorney to disclose that you told him you were guilty, but if you ask them to help you suppress evidence or intimidate a witness, nothing stops the attorney from turning you in, and they have reasons to do just that as you’ve just made them complicit in your new crime and that is not protected by privilege.


  • Getting people sorted into servers that are going to be able to handle the load, or even better getting them to host their own servers is going to be the way to go.

    That part still worries me a smidge, and it’s somewhat related to my other concern about funding/scaling. As more of the general public discover and move over, the % of the general population willing and able to host their own instance is going to steadily decrease. Not saying that we’re all gonna die or anything, but it’s going to be a shift and we’ll have to continue to adapt.