The cognizant google employees I worked with were actually VERY in support of unionizing, even more so than google employees themselves, it was a really interesting mix of people and they didn’t have their heads up their asses like normal techbro google employees who are used to everything working out and handwaving away systematic concerns.

Multiple attempts over the years had been made to unionize, but Google always crushed them with an iron fist.

Notice how Google Maps data hasn’t been improving, and if anything getting worse?

I worked for Cognizant, a contractor for Google maps at the Bothell office. I worked for a contractor that Google would fire every 5 years, contract it to another company and change the sign on the office building they owned…then rehire everyone. One of the benefits of this for them (one of the key benefits) was it made it much harder for workers to organize especially because Cognizant and Google can just play “go talk to the other parent I cant do anything” when workers ask for help because they were suffering/needed higher pay to survive/needed basic accomodations.

I worked for Google but Google didn’t want to pay me or my coworkers a living wage, so Google paid some lawyers to make it so they could pretend we didn’t work for Google.

Google is a trash company with absolutely zero idea how to move forward into the future, the company was absolutely chock full of intelligent interesting smart people but Google was so shortsighted that they forced my whole department back to the office for no good reason (literally everything was remote work too).

My experience after working for Google was that Google was most definitely going to collapse within the decade in terms of market power, at the very least in the realm of maps/spatial data.

What a shameful, pathetic company and the management should be ashamed of how stupid and out of touch they were.

Also, completely and utterly anti-worker.

(Cognizant is trash too but if you have ever heard of the company Cognizant you already know that).

A particular point of shame I want to level at the management above me at Cognizant and Google, most of our work was involved with prototyping google maps data editing and QC workflows… that could then be exported to India or somewhere else with cheap labor… except upper management was racist as fuck against Indian workers and would complain about their shoddy work indirectly all the time…

…and never bring up that they specifically wanted to hire Indians so they could pay them shit and treat them like shit. If you were a tech worker in India would you work as hard as I did for far far far far less pay and WAY worse treatment?

I actually led a training class on a workflow that was absolutely not suited for new workers to Google Maps gis data editing to… totally new entry level hires in India, and the Indians were frequently cheating or totally checking out… again because why the hell would they take this shit seriously? To be clear most people were like most people, they just did the best job they could, but there were lots of people I was training that could see right through the bullshit of the entire system and I can ZERO percent blame them for not disrespecting themselves by treating Google like it was genuine in its offers of employment, stability and a career.

Management encouraged a culture where lowkey shitting on Indians for being lazy and dumb was basically accepted because it rationalized the cruelty, inefficiency and stupidity of the entire system.

I hate Google.

Hell yeah! Go play some videooooo gamesss

I know in steam you can set the order of controllers (player 1, 2, 3, 4) but I can’t remember if you can set controllers to the same player.

At any rate you can map both controllers to output keyboard commands and then have the game receive input from mouse and keyboard and then the game will think it is receiving input from only one device.

Hmm I wonder if antimicrox would allow you to combine two inputs into one composite input, I don’t have experience with it so I can’t say for sure but it seems like the kind of utility that would.

https://github.com/AntiMicroX/antimicrox

What I would do in this situation is map the controls to keyboard, then use a Controller-to-Keyboard mapping program to map all the controller buttons to the keyboard buttons. So map both controllers D-Pads to W-A-S-D (or arrows, or whatever really) then set those keyboard controls to your movement controls in the emulator.

https://www.reddit.com/r/EmulationOnPC/comments/165tewk/mapping_multiple_controllers_to_the_same_input/

organice is front end that runs entirely in a mobile or desktop browser that allows you to access and edit org files easily with a touchscreen or mouse and keyboard. It obviously doesn’t have full org mode functionality, but it does a have a calendar view.

https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice

All you have to do is navigate to https://organice.200ok.ch in your phone’s browser and then pin it to your start screen. The PWA is downloaded and you can now access a remote webdav server with the locally saved front end of organice. No data is sent to organice, the only function of the website is to give you an easy place to download the PWA to your device using a web browser.

I love love love love org mode, it is just simple yet so powerful and there really is nothing else like it, I can’t really recommend anything else in good conscience here, especially since most other options (except for logseq https://logseq.com/ which I am not sure does everything you want?) are commercial and who knows what the hell will happen when the company goes out of business or is bought out by someone else?

I recommend Spacemacs or Doom emacs as a nice starting point for emacs, or you can just start with basic emacs and build it yourself as org mode is included in the default distribution of emacs.

An additional thing to think about, there is an android release of emacs coming up, so org mode might get much more accessible on the go in the future!

No worries if you aren’t interested, I am just providing some additional context.

https://www.spacemacs.org/

https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs

This video is a great thorough but approachable explanation of why org mode is so special:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEeStDz_imQ

The important question is why smartphones are designed around not having root access and computers are?

What are the incentives at play?

The answer is obvious, tech companies wouldn’t have given users access to root control on their computers either if they knew what they were doing and thought they could have gotten away with it.

It is just circular logic claiming smartphones have to be this way, circular logic that provides a rhetorical smokescreen for the process of corporations taking our agency away from us over our lives and the tools that sustain us.

Isn’t it so nice when you think “I would like to edit an image on this computer” so you simply download an image editor and edit the image.

Best part of FOSS, the software is just there waiting for you to use it. Which sounds like a stupid statement to make, but proprietary software only allows you to use it after you have jumped through any number of meaningless hoops.

They don’t even give you any fish for jumping through the hoops either, which every time I tell that to a dolphin they just start laughing at me like I am a fool.

Yeah but it is basically a shameless rip off of Xonotic’s one.

I am a reallllllllly good at rocket league and I am doing an aerial-behind-the-goal-post rebounce shot. Glorious. Thank you.

Once YouTube decides you might be a good candidate for rightwing radicalization or conspiracy theories, good luck getting the algorithm to show you anything else lol. I am honestly surprised you even got the algorithm off that in 5 months. YouTube has permanently decided I am a good target to manipulate into conspiracies and rightwing content based on the fact that it has figured out I am a white man and I watch YouTube. Does it matter the only youtube political content I watch is leftist YouTube channels like the Majority Report? It does not.

I’ve also seen his temper in his videos plus adding what he said in this video, I am convinced the guy should not be allowed to own a damm BBGun. But he’s lucky he doesnt live in a “communist state”. Yo what a shitshow.

You can see with these conservative white men when they clearly perceive a threatening universe everywhere they look based on their ideology. It is what directly leads to their irrational bouts of anger and violence, and causes things like…

"A 14-year-old African-American boy stopped to ask for directions to school in a Detroit suburb but was shot at instead, according to prosecutors…I got to the house and I knocked on the lady’s door. Then she started yelling at me and she was like, ‘Why are you trying to break into my house?’ " Walker told local station WJBK. “And I was trying to explain to her that I was trying to get directions to Rochester High. And she kept yelling at me. The guy came downstairs, and then he grabbed the gun, and I saw it and started to run. And that’s when I heard the gunshot,” he told the station.

the same old story over and over again

Rightwing white men afraid of the world and thus ready to project anger and violence at the slightest confirmation of whatever dumb bullshit they believe in isn’t a cute look for any community, which is probably why these people tend to feel so isolated in the first place…

I watched this guy for a little bit and liked his Linux stuff and then in one video he started ranting about how those FOSS licenses that include a requirement to use software ethically are the worst thing in the universe because they bring politics into software and I thought “wait, this guy is ignorant asshole isn’t he?” and turns out yes, yes he is.

Not making the point to defend those licenses or not but all this guy cared about was FOSS not being political and it’s like…are you a child? Do you not understand how all of this is political?

People like this guy give FOSS a really ugly outward facing identity and it turns away soooo many potential contributors and chill people.

To your point about this guy being exactly the kind of person that shouldn’t be allowed to own a precision semiautomatic rifle with 30 round magazines of high caliber rifle rounds, I agree, I have seen that guy get so fucking angry about shit on his channel, he has no ability to control his anger and that kind of person shouldn’t be allowed to own an object that gives their temper tantrums the capacity to kill so many people so quickly before their rational control kicks back in.

You have to understand, this late into the slow motion apocalypse the writers were starting to get eaten by hellhounds and so there is a lot of rushed writing/plot arcs that just doesn’t much sense when you look too closely because it isn’t like the lizard people were going to reduce the apocalypse guild writers quota just because some of them (most of them) had been eaten by hellhounds, the lizard people SENT the hellhounds so that would have just made the lizard people look incompetent.

I mean, it’s the same old enshittification thing and all you know the story.

The only thing better than vim keybindings for programming is vim keybindings for org mode (I know neovim has some org mode stuff but it isn’t the same as full blown org mode in emacs).

Y’all just waste your time obsessing over dumb shit turns on tv and binges shows for 5 hours

How about they just highlight apps well reviewed by actual humans and fix their damn junk filled store?

So the issue here is not capitalism, but non-free proprietary software, because it makes it easy to abuse users. Unfortunately most people haven’t even heard of Free Software. They don’t realise that they deserve certain rights when using computers. I think if more people were familiar with the Free Software movement, they would think differently and they would demand freedom. Not all Lemmy users have heard of Free Software, but many of us understand that freedom is important. So we use it, even though it’s not convenient and the UI sucks.

We are capable of competing with corporations and often making better software that them, but that’s not enough. If people don’t understand the issues we are trying to solve, they will just use whatever new shiny app that comes out next. That’s why some Twitter users migrated to Bluesky and Threads. They don’t understand that after a while they will be abused the same way as before.

The reason people don’t understand the issues you are trying to solve is because yall that think like this in the free software movement won’t talk about the issues in terms of a broader political context that is actually relevant to normal people, in a language they are going to understand. Too many prominent people in FOSS just want to create these weird libertarian fantasies centered on technical problems and technical solutions without stepping back and recognizing the inherently socialist thrust of free software and the power that comes from speaking directly to the broader public about software in those terms.

So long as libertarian style ideology in FOSS fumbles around with trying to reinvent the wheel from first principles while socialists, unions and leftists exasperatedly gesture at the already existing wheels all around them, FOSS will always be a marginal movement of hobbyists without real political power to enact change in the realm of software and improve the lives of everybody not just extremely technologically literate people.

If you try to sell the FOSS movement like you are, as a clever technical licensing method to give users more freedom over how they use their particular niche software, and don’t connect these struggles in software to a broader class struggle or a related critique of why capitalism is so awful at creating tools and utilities we can rely on, than FOSS will always be an obscure island the broader public could care less about.

But we need to convince people to care about freedom too. There will always be some excuse to not use the freedom respecting alternative. Look at Reddit users. They could all join us here and change something, but they don’t care. Same with Twitter, Windows, etc. It’s always difficult, it’s always annoying. But if we spread the message and help people with their issues, we can convince at least some of them…

….But we can’t just give up on our freedom and privacy. We are aware of Matrix’s issues and they won’t be fixed in a month or even a year. In the future Discord will have even more users and it will be even harder to escape it. So there is no reason to wait, we have to fight this battle now. This is the right thing to do.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and Ian starting to feel like the situation we are in feels impossible partially because of the way we have let capitalism define what we call “friction” in apps.

Friction as a concept can do a lot of good in getting developers to be laser focused on how it actually feels to use a software as a human, but also… does Lemmy cause “friction” for new users because they simply cannot physically imagine a social network outside the context of a massive corporation?

Discord is undoubtedly very slick to use but no one can convince me that Discord, Bluesky, Threads etc… don’t have a huge advantage in being low “friction” from being imaginable by the average person.

We need to start differentiating between the shitty kind of friction that needlessly pushes away users and frustrates them and generative friction where the difficulty of getting someone to use something is an expression of traction where a broader invitation to think more radically about what is possible in community organization can happen. Seen from this light onboarding someone onto Lemmy is a million times harder than onboarding someone onto Discord, but that is because onboarding someone onto Lemmy is actually doing something far more difficult and meaningful.

Getting someone to try Lemmy who before wouldn’t have tried it (or hadn’t even heard of it) expands the realm of what is possible in that person’s mind. It isn’t fair to expect that to magically happen with less friction than shuffling people onto yet another corporate social media service in the honeymoon phase where there aren’t many ads and things are artificially cheap…. If the situation is the same, and your onboarding has done no work on the system, it damn well better be easy.

I mean, not all books should be difficult or challenging works of literature, but if your objective is to be genuinely changed by a book than you can’t really expect to get there without friction between you and the book. A frictionless book that just glides through you has no purchase to enact a genuine change in the fabric of your mind.

Should we not think of social media community building in a similar light? Yes there are annoying works of literature that seem purposefully obtuse (bad friction) but by the same token it is the challenging books that actually transform our minds.

Even if that one person you get to try Lemmy only tries it briefly and then just drifts off, you have fundamentally changed what that person thinks can be possible in the realm of online communities and that is no small victory even if it is harder to quantify.

I think in a weird way one of the problems is the feeling that you have to get it right the first time. I think we need to obviously make it wayyyy easier and less intimidating for people to find instances to sign up at that are a good fit for them, but also I think we just need to send way more of a “get it wrong, treat your first account as just a fun diversion, don’t feel like you need to find the perfect home immediately” vibe. Not every social media account needs to be a permanent investment, it can just be a momentary passing version of yourself along your way from one place to another.

I think a lot of the subconscious anxiety is about trying to nab the handle you like to use on a popular up and coming social network before everyone else jumps on and takes your precious name… but there is no rush here. Your handle will likely sit untaken on more fediverse servers than you can shake a stick at, indefinitely.