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[Microblog] RE: circumstances (cosocial.ca)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/microblogs@piefed.social
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RE: circumstances.run/@davidgerardI'd like to tell you a story about a contributor who came to us at Mozilla, in my first 2-3 years working there. I never met them, don't know their name, and I still think about them a few times a year. They came to us with questions, as they were struggling to build Firefox on their computer, and they were getting errors that nobody had ever seen. And I don't mean "errors that were unfamiliar to our engineers", I mean "we can't figure out how or why our build system would emit that string."

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[–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago (14 children)

So, after going back and forth a bit with person, who it turns out is in their early teens, we asking about their hardware, what setup they've got that's doing this. Maybe this person's got some new system we've never seen, maybe they're running in some novel context we need to know about. Is this an edge case, or is this a leading-edge case? Outliers are always interesting. I've seen some Pretty Far Out There systems, I run a few myself, and this kid's system is Out There.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (13 children)

    So, they're running one of those weird dual-slot Pentium III boards with two physical CPUs. Running Linux - somehow - on a hard drive that's almost full, a userspace partition on NTFS and more, and the more I hear about this system the more confused I get.For the non nerds following this thread, this is like finding out somebody's daily driver is built out of the parts of a sports car, a semi and a train, and it's running on vegetable oil. You might ask why, but the first question is ... how?

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (12 children)

    This kid is getting error message that nobody has ever seen because they've got a machine nobody else has, set up like nobody else does that nobody would ever choose. And you might ask how, but the first question is why?And the answer is: this kid has nothing. And they've built their own computer out parts they've scavenged from the computers other people have put to the curb, got a Linux ISO and somehow made it work. There are no computers like this. And... they want to help us?

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (11 children)

    And I'm sitting there, reading this on the screen of a five thousand dollar Macbook Pro in an office where the snacks are free, feeling humbled and deeply ashamed.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (10 children)

    There's nothing I can do for this person. But the enormity of it. They've cobbled up a machine out of nothing but trash and their own tenacity, and they want to help us build Firefox? There's lots of ways to do that, but building it, compiling it, that can't happen. Not on this machine. There's always been a financial barrier to participation in open source. Always. And we have to make it as low as we possibly can. But a wealth minimum bar, to contributing? That's vile. It's disgusting.

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  • [–] 1 point 12 hours ago

    @mhoye That kind of reminds me of my childhood and my first computer. An AMD 386 based PC with Win 3.11, decommissioned by my secondary school and reserved for me by my computer science teacher. I was maybe 12 back then.Now, 30 years later, a software engineer going straight to 20 years of experience, owning privately multiple ThinkPads, professionally using two more. What a wild ride.

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  • [–] 1 point 14 hours ago

    @mhoye a few years back, at the peak of my devrel days, I met a friend (also speaker) at a conference. She is one of those overall-incredible-humans who started in open source, education and weird projects and “made it„ and got hired by a big company — this was Microsoft at the time — but being the kind soul they are kept their authenticity, so still, as a MS employee their talk was anything but. Anyway, we got to talk at one point and she has expressed deep frustration over… now being paid to work on VSCode while she interacted on a daily basis dozens of people who were not, in fact, getting paid to work on the same project.This hit me like a ton of brick at the time, and stuck with me for the rest of my life...

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)

    In conclusion, saying that open source participation requires monthly fees to private companies that run stochastic code generators means you’ve forgotten why anyone is doing this at all. Fuck this whole idea and fuck Linus in particular for pushing it.

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  • [–] 1 point 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (3 children)

    ‌‌‌‌‌@mhoye wait a tool is a tool.If I pay to run local model that find exploits, can be a good thing. And if the kernel team trains and runs its own statistic correlation to throw the worst shit to the kernel to find vulerabilities, this can be good. The starting point could be every vulnerability found until now.Different thing is getting done a module vibecoding it or auditing it trough outsource delivered context windows.Evreybody is probing OSystems to find breaches, to jump out VM and containers, even chroot, to hack openssl, to shape encrypted streams, deanonymize etc...Not what but how. It's just a tool‌

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 9 hours ago (2 children)

    @rskrg that’s like saying a blood diamond is just a rock. Where things come from and what it costs to make them, externalities and all, that matters.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 child)

    ‌@mhoye analogies are always wrong.Diamonds are not made. If I find one it makes no effort.Rare materials in processor capable of matrix calculations, envirorment for LLMs, are fewer than rare materials in most diffused devices.Moral accusation to inference are silly.Despite marketing made them appear as something they are not, fuelling fears or investments depending which point of view both are sons of insufficent knolowdge of the matter, to be polite

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 7 hours ago

    @rskrg I mean, you clearly have no curiosity about this at all but if it helps you to understand the analogy, here's the wikipedia article about child labor in the diamond industry: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_la

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 21 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

    Getting back to this thread - I've edited some posts upstream to make my point a little more clear - but two things. One, the idea that contributing to free and open software should require so much as contact with, much less a subscription service to, a wildly unprofitable, unethical and proprietary software service is a noxious, irresponsible and nonsensical position. But two: god, kid wherever you are I hope you're doing amazingly well. I hope you made it. You deserved at least that.

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