As part of the devs farewell message on their site, they have included malicious code to make each visitor sends 2,000 requests to the dbzer0 servers in an attempt to DDOS and take the instance offline.
This is an important post and I appreciate the insight into the happenings on the Fediverse, but the comment chains are going off the rails and I’ve issued a number of bans from this post alone.
Locking.
Genuinely think this post should be pinned for prosperity and a warning to others. Lemmy does not appreciate censorship.
Can someone please ELI5?
This is all it takes to wreck a lemmy instance?
I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed someone going so hard off the rails. It’s been an entertaining few days really.
It’s what happens when someone with underdeveloped empathy gets caught doing something they know is wrong, resulting in emotional overload.
It’s textbook toddler tantrum.
With stunted empathy, people seeking an explanation and apology are met with increasingly greater resistance.
And like textbook, they claim to be the victim. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are lying about receiving death threats.
What’s crazy is they could have simply:
- Apologised
- Explained the intent to reduce toxicity
- Agreed there was a lack of transparency
- Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature
But no. They were caught while they were secretly trying to play internet dictator and refused to empathise with others that were hurt and shocked to find out a tool they were using was receiving undisclosed payloads to use to censor communities and individuals.
I strongly implore everyone to leave this developer alone. Jokingly asking to be added to the list etc empowers them to continue to play the victim. They do not deserve attention.
What’s crazy is they could have simply:
- Apologised
- Explained the intent to reduce toxicity
- Agreed there was a lack of transparency
- Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature
Yes, I think there is genuinely an audience for what he was doing (or something akin to it), and it would genuinely have been a useful onboarding tool for getting a certain type of person to consider dipping their toes in the Fediverse.
But first of all it absolutely has to be separated from the safety/anti-spam filters. Bundling it with those is very malicious.
Second it must be opt-in.
Third, it must clearly say somewhere that “this anti-toxic setting is a curated block list based on my personal preferences”. There should then have been an option to use a personal blocklist instead of the developer default.
And fourth, I guess ideally this type of filter should maybe have been maintained by a somewhat more… well-balanced individual.
Anyone who thinks “yeah lgbt stuff should be hidden because we want to attract people who don’t want to see LGBT stuff” is someone I don’t want anywhere near the fediverse.
Yes, agreed. Wholesome Yuri being banned might be the most outrageous decision of them all on the banlist, for me.
Tbh for me it was more outrageous how it interferes with moderation. There are admins from big instances who weren’t blocked themself and mods from big active communities on that list. If they write warning comments, users of this frontend will simply not see them
And tho user and comment regex is a mess, partially containing very random things. Lot’s of possible wrong matches. This whole thing is from no viewpoint a good idea
Also from the other end, because of how the filter works, mods using couldn’t see messages the user put, so they’d have been free to do whatever, until caught by either a bot, or moderators not using the frontend.
One of the reasons it was found to begin with was because the db-zer0 instance was on it, and the admin, who was using tesseract, suddenly couldn’t load any posts from the instance at all. As Tesseract presents it as a compatibility issue, they were trying to track down the fault at the time.
Very good point, that’s horrible. And blocking “your own” instance is pretty dumb. I wonder if db0 would also not been able to read own posts if the instance wasn’t blocked.
Idk, “🥺👉👈” was pretty wild
Full agreement. Part of the problem is that the blocklist was kinda bonkers in who was included
Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature
No! The whole point of the fediverse is not to have centralised blocklists. Having blocklists baked in to the code, especially ones that get updated in a centralised manner with no accountability and without telling users they’re on it is absolutely antithetical to the platform and one of the main reasons why people are leaving reddit and coming here. If you want to curate the experience of a user in that manner, what you do is open an instance and advertise it as such. That way people can, at least on lemmy, know where they’re banned from without having to dive into the code or pull API endpoints manually. In fact how a lemmy instance federates and how it curates this experience is one of the distinguishing features among the instances. You have instances like lemmy.zip that federate all that will have them, instances like hexbear that are very quick to defederate in order to keep a safe-space and instances like blahaj that are somewhere between.
A front-end (or any piece of code that is made for being deployed on multiple instances) should be agnostic to all of this. It’s up to the admins of the instances and not the devs to curate and this is one of the main reasons why I don’t trust the piefed dev. Sure you can disable almost everything, but that still means that an admin has to do work in order to get to a neutral place from where they can then curate.
Not every admin has the time or skill to curate. As long as the dev is open about it and there are configurable features to disable it, I don’t see what the issue is. Ultimately it creates no difference for a user if the admin creates it or the Dev does as long as it’s communicated.
The advantage of the fediverse is “don’t like it, go to another instance or build your own”, not to tell devs what they can and can’t do. Hell I never even interacted with Tesseract since I use a different client and an open instance.
The issue is that it’s one person shadowbanning people without their knowledge for any arbitrary reason across instances. Like even if it’s opt-out, that’s still problematic since it makes the default experience whatever that one person thinks it should be. Why should one guy get to decide across the entire fediverse whether your posts are opt-in? That is antithetical to the very concept of the fediverse.
Except one guy isn’t. You have to choose to install the software. It’s not included by default. I’m running a local client (Voyager) and never dealt with any of that because the admins of my instance don’t use it either.
And every user that uses that software for whatever reason, superior features, easier on the eyes, more popular it’s what everyone recommended will get their curation from that one dev.
Which is why it’s ultimately the decision of the admin. Don’t like what the admin of your instance is doing. Go make your own. That’s the beauty of the fediverse. It’s choice all the way down. It’s not like Reddit where you’d be stuck.
I dunno, I can understand a curated blocklist, topic-based. Obviously not what this is - if things were up front it wouldn’t have been an issue - but maybe someone just does not like memes. A curated meme community list would be handy. If someone didn’t want to be on a more curated instance like blahaj but still wanted to filter out specifically problematic anti-trans users, that would be useful.
Just like its up to the users to decide what instance you want to join, it also should be up to the user to decide if they want to take that further, and a front end would be the appropriate place for that (especially since its not baked into lemmy or piefed to have an imported list).
The problem has nothing to do with the option of centralized blocklists, but the hidden nature of the one in tesseract in its entirety.
I am sorry, but I disagree with the “centralised blocklists” in a:
Decentralized social networking platforms…
SourceYou should be able to block and unblock freely whoever and whatever you want.
The “centralized” may be suggestions (i.e., toggleable), and only, where instances with opt-in keep them implicit/optional, and instances with opt-out explicitly warn about them during a registration.It’s up to the admins of the instances and not the devs to curate and this is one of the main reasons why I don’t trust the piefed dev.
Can you elaborate on that? Asking for curiosity, not to challenge you.
PieFed has a default list of domains/instances that are blocked when you do a fresh install for a brand new instance. A critical difference between PieFed and the Tesseract blocks is that any of the blocks in PieFed are completely visible to, and under the control of the admins of the instance. So, ultimately, it is just an out-of-the-box default, but the instance admins always have ultimate control over moderation/federation choices. This Tesseract stuff is taking those powers away from the admins.
The two main lists that are implemented by default are a defederation list and huge huge listof blocked domains which includes wikileaks for instance, there are other lists (I don’t know if the “trusted instance” list comes prepopulated) and almost all can be emptied or added to. But that means that an admin that sets up the software has to go through a whole rigmarole to get the instance to neutral before being able to do what they think is best. And hope they didn’t miss anything.
In the case of the blocked domains it’s particularly grating since it has like 4000 entries that you either have to delete one-by-one or have to do a manual db transaction to empty the list and that is by design. Plus all you get as a warning that such a list exists is one line during the setup that says
Added 'No-QAnon' blocklist, see https://github.com/rimu/no-qanonbut it’s definitely not just QAnon links.Thanks for the info!
FYI, next version of PieFed has an “Unban All” button for clearing all domain bans to try to make this easier.
Screenshot from my instance:
Oh that’s good to hear. It sucks that people have to constantly fight the dev to keep his opinions out of the code though, must be tiring for all involved surely…
Honestly, I can see a “curated” list of user/instance bans as a feature, similar to unlock. But let people chose them.
Yeah, either that or at least if everyone on the blocklist was like nazis or something it seems like he would’ve had at least half a leg to stand on. But the fact that the most random and benign users showed up on it and he was still trying to justify it as “making the experience better for the fediverse” showed that he was just some asshole completely convinced of his own righteousness.
TIL that I’m benign… Ouch.
If he had just implemented the list as a default that anyone could edit, he would have gotten pretty much what he wanted. I mean, some people would have edited the list, some would have deleted the list, but most people are lazy or uninformed and would have simply accepted the default.
I really hope the tesseract fork implements this feature.
Nothing would prove him more wrong than actually implement what he wanted in a sensible, non-dickish way.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they are lying about receiving death threats.
100%. I’m willing to bet he didn’t even receive any threats. The guy was a short-lived lolcow.
Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature
Not sure this would help in itself, even though more flexible blocking would ironically be nice. The value in such a list lies in how it’s curated, and the guy is still certifiable and about 3yo mentally, tops.
Text book narcissistic collapse
I don’t really go on a blocking spree much. How would a front end’s block list implementation be different than the instance’s choice of software’s block list implementation?
I hardly browse All and Local. I am on a piefed based instance, and leave “Enable Automatic Follow of Feed Communities.” and “Enable Automatic Leave of Feed Communities.” on. So kind of my subscribed feed is semi automatic as long as I follow a broad topic.
I agree, I’m almost sad it’s (presumably) over now.
Then again, he already “left” once before (and came back), so who’s to say? We might be clowning on him on and off the rest of the year if he keeps it up.
I saw a vaguely similar situation a long time ago where someone was a positive, contributing member of the community and then they fell from grace somehow and basically no one was thankful enough so they were banned and they just kept evading the bans and posting smut in the forums for weeks.
The way this guy has really thrown his weight into this but still obviously feels like the victim is really reminiscent, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some more to come.
That’s weirdly sort of how I got my job.
Apparently my predecessor was a nice guy with low boundaries that (at the time) lacked managerial support. When he painted himself into a corner on his commitments, didn’t get the accolades or raises he thought he should get, he got bitter, started to act out, stopped doing work he should have done, and finally, when management started pressing him to clean up some messes he had created over a year+ of neglecting his responsibilities, he left an unsigned resignation letter on his desk and didn’t come to work for a few days.
He called to discuss the terms of his return, expecting a raise, and they just told him they accepted his resignation.LOL. Sounds like an idiot. Even if the guy was really needed, you can’t have someone like that on your team.
Just another reminder, no one cares about you in the slave factory. Prioritize yourself over work and don’t build up loyalty to a rich asshole.
Thats not really the right lesson to learn here.
Just have real, non-combative conversations with your colleagues and supervisors. Don’t communicate with stupid games and manipulation.
You are talking about the aftereffects whereas mine was about the cause. Mental health is important.
Yeah, best case scenario they work out some kind of deal just to keep the machine turning for a little longer… but he can bet his ass that the second he steps out of that room they’ll be putting up job listings for his replacement.
The manager they brought in to bring him in line has been one of the best, kindest, and most human managers I’ve ever met. (But she doesn’t fuck around.)
She’s also an absolute shark at knowing the system, and without going into specifics, has done very well for everyone on my team that has been even modestly competent.
I honestly feel bad for the guy. He was too far in the hole of anger and resentment to realize that he’d been handed a whole new opportunity before he squandered it.
Shortly after I was hired, several other people were hired in to help with the flow of work, and my team went from being sort of an embarrassment to one that, quite frankly, is awesome. (And we still have a good work-life balance.)Hell yeah! Happy for you
Neverending crashout.
Hes probably writing a manifesto right now.
They basically did, it shows to anyone that visits dubvee.
Which should only be viewed though an archive site as it could cause bad things to db0
And thankfully others already pulled the text so no one has too, but should still get it archived
Which should only be viewed though an archive site as it could cause bad things to db0
or with a JavaScript blocker
It’s okay, they are a measured and non-violent individual that just wants Lemmy to be friendly for the “normies.”
They’re a good guy™︎!
The idea that they are the standard-bearer for normal people.
so true
I have received a constant stream of harassing messages, death threats, and threats of doxxing over DM, Matrix, Github, and Codeberg. All of it instigated and eggged on by another instance’s top admin.
you’re the good guys wooooooo!
go fediverse!!
Right, because all of us personally sent harrassing messages, death threats, etc.
See I don’t doubt that he received harrassment, hell I can even believe he got death threats. And that really sucks, I’m sorry he experienced that.
Isn’t it convenient how there are no receipts of them though? Or any trace of the supposed dude egging people on to do it? It’s a diversion tactic that’s honestly becoming quite old.
Half your comments are complaining about commies like it’s the cold war
Not for those of us on the dbzer0 instance 😭
Honestly it was pretty common on classic Reddit. Usually a modder. Often times a script kiddie/chrome extension.
It feels nice to see it here and it really takes me back.
The Empress thing was pretty up there hahaha
We need a hobbydrama community lol
Oh I’ve got one for you, the Kaldeian crashout.
Nice! I needed something to read at work tomorrow.
he is probably still reading these discussions lol
In case somebody wanted confirmation. Maybe don’t visit the page with Javascript enabled.
Jesus the most petty of little bitches.
And that full text, also to avoid extra visits:
You crazies won and proved me wrong. The fediverse isn’t worth saving after all.
Over the course of the last several days, I have received a constant stream of harassing messages, death threats, and threats of doxxing over DM, Matrix, Github, and Codeberg. All of it instigated and eggged on by another instance’s top admin. This is unacceptable for all of the reasons in the world, and while I won’t give you the personal satisfaction of having won, you’ve definitely proven me wrong about the fediverse being something that even can be saved from itself.
Even people around here I’d interacted with positively for years and had grown to respect because they seemed level headed and above the immature and sociopathic bullshit that dominates this platform showed their true selves. That completely shattered any and all illusions I had that this place has a hidden core of users that I should try to make more visible amongst all the rage, rage baiting, propaganda, harassment, rumor mongering, trolls, conspiracies, purity testing, witch hunts, and violent rhetoric.
Like many of the rational people before me who called this place home, I’m done with this place.
I tried to carve out a space where those people and other rougher edges were not drowning out niche communities and hobbies and where people who choose to use the platform to harass others were also out of sight, out of mind. Apparently only three people who aren’t me actually want a place that’s not just a circle-jerk of rage and hate. Thus sayeth the mob.
Then you have entire instances whose admins call for the death of others, harass other users, and lead harassment, brigading, and DARVO campaigns against those who dare call out their bullshit or decide to disassociate themselves and their work from them.
Lemmy.World was so close to doing the right thing after instance-that-will-not-be named’s admins were calling for the death of LW’s admins while spreading rumours and labeling others in such a way that painted them as targets for murder. All of that, mind you, with absoultey no evidence other than specuation and their own cooked-up conspiracies about modlog actions or taking and twisting things wildly out of context to fit their made-up narratives so they had someone to say they ‘caught’ and should be killed.
.world was on the precipice of doing the right thing and disaccociating themselves from that psychotic shit show, but silently dropped the issue and carried on as usual after wringing their hands for maybe two weeks.
“We have to worry about the optics or the politics of it.” they probably said.
Bullshit.
I’m one person and have held my fucking ground, mostly with dignity and grace, in the heat of my own shitstorm of trying to disaccociate from the extremist elements of the fediverse. If I can stand up for what’s right and deal with the blowback, so can you.
Fuck lemmy world’s admin team for condoning that behavior and letting the human skidmark db0 DARVO his way out of the situation while brigading with his army of malcontents whom he wields like a cult leader. He knows exactly what he is doing, and you all continue to allow him to get away with it.
Nah, fuck this whole place. I’ve let too many things fall by the wayside IRL because of dealing with all this fediverse bullshit and trying to give it the slightest bit of polish both visually and atmospherically. Mythbusters may have proven that you can, in fact, polish a turd, but at the end of the day, it’s still a shiny ball of shit.
For the few people left who didn’t turn out to be psychotic, I’ll think of you from time to time when recalling something you’ve posted or commented that genuinely made me laugh, made me think, or otherwise put a smile on my face or in my heart.
Everyone else, though, enjoy your toxic, xenophobic, knee-jerk-to-violence, purity-testing, and harassing-anyone-who-doesn’t-fall-in-line cess pit. One day you, too, will do or say something that doesn’t toe the line and you’ll be right where I am.
P.S. Rimu, you owe me a beer. No one is talking about the Piefed vote quotas anymore, so you’re welcome.
The disconnect from reality is insane. They completely ignore why people got mad and make up imaginary reasons for why they got the hate while painting themselves like some hero trying to stand for us but getting betrayed in return. It’s both hilarious and sad. I hope that they will have time for self reflection once they get off the threadiverse and become a better person but I don’t have much expectations given how deep they are into the delusion.
That is just the thing. They do see themselves as some sort of savior for the rest of us.
I have received a constant stream of harassing messages, death threats, and threats of doxxing over DM, Matrix, Github, and Codeberg. All of it instigated and eggged on by another instance’s top admin.
I’m getting pretty sick of this kind of claim. Like, do I believe he’s been harassed? Yeah, that seems likely. Death threats? That’s definitely possible. What I take issue with is the way it’s brought up.
He frames that it’s a campaign run by a particular individual targeting him, but there are no receipts. He’s using it as a shield against critique, shutting down any discussion around this by pointing at something and screaming about how he’s a big victim here.
Same thing the last time, a claim of coordinated attacks (of which there were none), and anyone who dared say “well thats not cool” were targeted, myself included.
Though I surprisingly didn’t make it into this list, but considering my commenting on it since, I’d probably make it into their next one.
These claims seem like a go-to for anyone caught doing something they know they shouldn’t have in a way they shouldn’t have.
All of that, mind you, with absoultey no evidence other than specuation and their own cooked-up conspiracies about modlog actions or taking and twisting things wildly out of context to fit their made-up narratives so they had someone to say they ‘caught’ and should be killed.
“We have to worry about the optics or the politics of it.” they probably said.
I lol’ed
I am shocked and appalled that the Admiral himself would use such toxic language. Perchance he needs to review the bad words on his list with those used in his rant.
/s
This just honestly sounds like he really does need to step away. Like this clearly seems to be giving him some kind of mental breakdown. It kind of seems like it stated with good intend and quickly spiralled into a god complex.
This mixed with other things I’ve read about him, I just wonder if he needs a little mental help. Or maybe he just needs to disconnect from the internet for awhile and live in reality. Either way, I don’t wish to shit talk. I just hope he gets what he needs in terms of help and support in the real world. Mental health is no joke.
Yes, I was following the orders of db0 and ada when I did it o7
Perchance, comrade.
Perchance o7
that even can be saved from itself
Huh, didn’t know the fediverse needed that. Oh wait, it doesn’t.
Wow. I consider myself a pretty frequent user of Lemmy, and I have no idea what they’re talking about here. Any of it. And if it doesn’t concern me, then it sure as fuck doesn’t concern any “normies”. Normies aren’t doing deep dives into Lemmy politics. They don’t know, and they don’t care—just like I don’t. It’s a classic case of taking a personal vendetta and pretending it’s some grand crusade for decency and normality.
This is the worst case of needing to touch grass I’ve ever seen. Maybe before posting something like that, go take a walk first? Get some fresh air.
What are the vote quotes they are referring to?
Just before this whole thing, the piefed dev pushed an update that capped how many up/downvotes piefed users can do per day. They set the cap to effectively punish like 3 users who posted all day everyday.
One of those users had a “I will leave unless you reconsider.” moment and they didn’t give half a shit. And they didn’t even make the list. None of their communities did.
So just a couple devs thrashing around causing as much collateral damage as possible.
Also punishes those who vote frequently, as I often do. I thought Voyager was having issues until I read the Piefed changelog. Unless my instance admin removes the limit I’m likely going back to lemmy.ca because I shouldn’t have to ration my upvotes. I like being able to boost engagement while also making it easier for me to see which comments I have or haven’t read yet.
Yeah the whole concept was dogshit from the beginning. It solved no problem except as an exercise of control.
Thank you. I do prefer Piefed but without all the restrictions he is imposing.
Is there perhaps a fork of it without these restrictions?
PieFed zip has removed at least the vote quota (or rather, they made it irrevelant)
Hoping piefed.ca does the same.
Right but there are other restrictions too such as hiding posts from certain websites I believe.
I cannot attest to any of it other than it exists:
https://codeberg.org/quokkau/PyLova
Forked during this or the last dramatic debacle with the dev.
I hadn’t heard about it until today either. The Streisand Effect is strong today.
Expert dev. Doesn’t even know the attribute for setting the language in the script tag is
type, notlang. Not to mention that you are encouraged to omit the attribute altogether if the script tag contains JavaScript…Petty, and a bad dev. Big yikes.
The random strikes me as curious too. I don’t see the point in doing
(100 - 1 + 1), you could express a random number between 1 and 100 in a simpler manner. Then he gets another random number and reuses that three times, for whatever reason.Then again, none of his other decisions make much sense to me so why would this?
There are a lot of these sorts of things. Look at the RegEx used in the block list. The author will likely be surprised that RegEx supports * and +.
Yeah the
- 1 + 1was weird to me too, serves no purpose.I can see how choosing a new random number for each fetch would prevent the server from caching the response, I suppose.
I can’t imagine this code was written in any other fashion than completely rage-induced, with shaking fingers and high blood pressure. 😂 What a putz.
I can’t imagine this code was written in any other fashion than completely rage-induced, with shaking fingers and high blood pressure. 😂 What a putz.
lmfao
I’ve drunk coded before (gotta hit the Ballmer Peak) but I don’t know if I’ve ever rage coded before.
I guess it’s just a pattern to easily get a number between
aandb, going(b - a + 1). Or maybe this is just vibecoded lolSeeing
(100 - 1 + 1)definitely bothers my brain lmaoLooking closer, the whole calculation bothers me now. Why do
floor() + 1instead of just usingceil… arghhhh
To be fair, it’s not as if it supports languages other than fucking Javascript anyway, so it mostly doesn’t matter.
Edit: I don’t want to split hairs about modules or json or whatever; I just want to be salty about how we could’ve had Scheme or Python in the browser.
The
typeattribute is not only to specify the language. It’s like one case out of several. It definitely matters in those contexts where you want to do the other things you can do with thetypeattribute.Actually some sites do. Instagram uses
type=application/jsonto store preloaded data.We could have had VM languages also like C# and Java and had web that was actually fast.
Well the
scripttag has a deprecated attribute calledlanguage, so in older code and media you will see<script language="javascript">a bunch. The weird thing is they instead used thelangattribute which just doesn’t exist.Uh huh. Exactly.
There used to be a
languageattribute, but I don’t think I’ve ever seenlangbefore.The lang attribute exists for other elements, but not on the script tag. 👍
I think this is the first time the whole fediverse agrees to who the asshole is.
Thanks, dev of Tesseract, you actually left a positive impact on the fediverse. Please don’t come back.
It’d be hilarious if this dude went to prison over this, because it seems like he finally crossed from “annoying and unethical but legal” to straight up illegal.
I could understand hardcoded blacklists if Tesseract was meant as a frontend for a Lemmy instance tailored for a specific purpose, and not intended for general use. But this, to DDOS a website because the developer is a whiny baby who can’t take criticism? This is a new low. This is disgusting, and damaging for the Lemmyverse as whole.
Good riddance then, I guess.
I doubt he’s gone, just hiding under an alt.
Then may he read and seethe at all of these comments and hopefully one day realize he’s wrong (I know, long shot)
I sincerely hope for his mental wellbeing that he doesn’t.
He absolutely is. He was trying to defend himself under his Kirk@ startrek.website account constantly these past few days.
As of ~an hour ago - FYI: StarTrek.website is no longer federating with Lemmy.dbzer0.com
So I guess they’ve chosen their side in this debate.
Knowing ValueSubtracted’s history, that’s not surprising in the slightest. It is very suspicious that this happened right after the Kirk account became active on every thread defending Patrick’s actions, and suddenly ST.W has an issue out of the blue with dbzer0. There’s likely something more to this behind closed doors.
makes sense why I was banned from there the other day when I started calling his alts out.
I don’t think that it’s unlikely. Just unhealthy.
Tesseract is officially malware. What a petulant child Patrick is.
I’ve never seen a dev do something like this. Pretty incredible that he put that in the code. It just shows the maturity level of these guys.
“Apparently only three people who aren’t me actually want a place that’s not just a circle-jerk of rage and hate.”
I think this is the best part of their message
He didn’t like my photography so he put me on the list.
Did you learn your lesson?
(I like the chandelier one, nice misty contrast and off centre composition)
Thanks!
Some of my favorite pictures aren’t well-loved by Lemmy, cause I’m a weirdo with weird taste.
I don’t think you can take great photos without a bit of weird in there personally - keep on posting them, I know ive enjoyed them!
Weird taste is best taste.
As a goth with blackout curtains, this is a welcome and comforting composition. Just have to avoid the beams.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Astoria, love that picture from the tower.
Those pics are awesome, especially the coast and the Seattle skyline shots!
Which is just further proof that twat had no taste lol
Thank you! I’m working hard out here! I just got back from a huge three-day art shoot in Seattle, so for the next few days, all my titles will be “Seattle, WA.” until I get back to shooting Portland content again.
Well, there’s another one going down the deep end. Can anyone enlighten me why there are devs losing their minds on the regular and pulling everyone else into their shitshow? Most of the time those people are actually skilled, but something goes wrong and they become megalomaniac, believing they are the arbiter of truth and a gift from god we all should be thankful for while they pull more and more insane shit.
It’s dictator syndrome. There’s always going to be a subset of the population that, after acquiring the faintest whiff of power or authority, seizes it like a drowning man.
@ineedmana@piefed.zip @1984@lemmy.today @rustysharp@programming.dev @iglou@programming.dev @digit@lemmy.wtf
You all made some very good points, and I think the answer lies somewhere at the focal point of all your theories at once. It takes a special kind of mentality to start a project like this, and factors like pressure, emotional baggage and/or instability, narcissism, autism, ADHD all come together, explaining the exceptionally violent breakdowns we’re seeing in the solo dev field.
I think it’s the pressure and the solo developer model
You put something out. It seems to be running. There are bugs. You fix them. There are more bugs (pareto is a PITA). You fix them too. Someone accuses you of sacrificing kittens in the basement. There are ideas for features and more bugs. Some worded in an entitled or just tone-deaf way. Very often you’re the only one working on the project and saying “I accept PRs” somehow became received as a FU. It becomes hard to put the project away for just a week
You are perpetually in “I-fix-it” mode
Not to mention that in order to even start a project like that one needs to have at least a bit of “fuck it, I’ll do it myself” mentalityIt’s a pity that !unfinishedprojects@forum.unfinishedprojects.net wound down. I hoped it might have been a space for projects to find communities. As we see around, it doesn’t require a 10 person team with a kanban board to write something that works. But on the other side of the spectrum I think a project needs some sort of community around it. So even if there’s only one dev, someone else could write the tutorials, less technical parts of docs, help new deployments etc
I just want to point out the poetic beauty of !unfinishedprojects@forum.unfinishedprojects.net becoming an unfinished project.
I’m sorry but that excuse is bullshit.
That is when they have a meltdown and quit the project because demand for bug fixes or new features it too much pressure.
This guy promoted a secret block list of leftists and when discovered, lashed out at his critics with a DDOS script.
Just another thin skinned fascist crying because their scheme was exposed.
The question I responded to was rather a general one. And I think that seeing all dev-related dramas as “that guy was just fascist all along” is similar to saying “all X are thieves” - a simplification that is easy to choose because it addresses our emotions regarding what has happened but not necessarily always the best explanation
That is when they have a meltdown and quit the project because demand for bug fixes or new features it too much pressure.
That requires self-awareness to ask oneself “maybe I need a break?” and I think such decision can be hard to make due to sunken cost fallacy. I think that with the pressure of the pings about bugs and requests etc, it’s easy to get into mindset of “it’s either on or off” with nothing in between. Because 5 bugs solved means only 3 other to go.
And the second option is to dig in harder and in this case “curate the feed. All of it. Whatever that means”I’m not saying that that person did not act out of an agenda. But I can imagine a set of choices that lead to a catastrophic breaking point
Yeah exactly. The dev had been talking for a while about how lemmy wasn’t good for their mental health and they weren’t enjoying it. Even a year ago they made a post saying they quit. But for some reason they came back a couple weeks later. And I guess over the past year it’s gotten worse and worse. I guess we’re witnessing a mental health crisis :(
Nobody wakes up and decides to be an asshole, it takes a lifetime of poor emotional self regulation.
Ah, but you see “asshole with a lifetime of poor emotional self regulation” is not “scheming fascist with an agenda”. That’s what I’m arguing with in your take
And in the scope of the question, which used plural “devs losing their minds”, I think that it would be a vilification to effectively say “they snap because they are fascists”
There are and will be non-fascist (and IMO also non-asshole) devs who snap. And I think some times it will be because of the feeling of responsibility for something, “either I fix it or it won’t get fixed” situation, lack of social/team/peer safety net, … (in my first comment I tried to rather portray the situation than name all those things because I just can’t name all of them)
I, for one, appreciate the post-mortem you’re doing here.
Calling someone an asshole and a fascist does nothing to show us how we got to this place. Stress and a lack of emotional regulation is a nightmare when you’re building in public.
considering the state of the world… the formation of the list and its secret origins for the explicitly stated purpose of regulating content to change the dynamics of power and silence of dissenting voices of the marginalized is fascist, and so the fascism steak happened before any fallout or pressure and was not a factor in reliving the possible pressure if there was any.
the list and his intentions are far worse then the attempt at DDOS, which even without detecting the code would have been identified almost instantly as if there wasn’t already reason enough to deny requests from tesrsserect. the attempt to explain the shit behavior does not follow the results
Being an open source dev requires thicker skin than you’d think, and even thinker than most people have.
Either you go the community route where you build a loyal user base, listen to feedback, and have q community of contributors as well.
Or you go the ‘I made something cool for me, and its open so anyone can use it too!’
The former is sustainable, the later is not if you domt maintain the idea that its yours first and only.
Once you start half listening to people using your stuff, but believe what you want is right, starts to isolate you.
You think all your users are stupid for their feature requests, because you don’t need it. Plus you alone are in charge. Its your repo.
This ego can continue to inflate to this point. I’ve seen it in both closed and open source (anyone remever when the FSLabs A320 for Microsoft flightsim with malware? Just me?.. Okay).
But this is by no means new.
Speaking as a nearly lifelong developer of one kind or another, with ASD and ADHD… there’s a big ol’ overlap. I’m not talking “the venn diagram is a circle” level overlap, but it is significant. Lots of people with these traits have personality quirks, differences in socioemotional processing from the “typical” stuff, experiences in early life, and other things, that can cause some pretty intense rabbit holing/spiraling when things get overwhelming.
To be clear though, this guy is obviously just a major dipshit. Nobody deserves being lumped in with that.
People who are attracted to computers often have emotional baggage. As a kid, I liked computers myself for that reason. I could escape the real world and have fun. The computer would do exactly what I wanted all the time.
Today, you have all kinds of emotionally unstable people using computers. The trans community are very much into computers as well, for the same reasons I did probably. Because it’s a safe space when you are different.
And yeah, some people will use their tech skills to cause damage. Others to build something useful.
I think you’re projecting a little. People act like this no matter the field. We swim in the tech pool, so we mostly only see the shit floating in our pool.
I can assure you the neighbour’s pool also has their fair share of floaters.
Would make sense, yeah. But different personality traits are attracted to different professions. They just have other issues if it’s more of an extrovert profession.
I’d say everyone has emotional baggage. I don’t see a single person growing up on this planet that can possibly not have emotional baggage.
The difference is about how you handle it. Emotional baggage and emotional instability are NOT connected.
I don’t think there is a particularly higher amount of people in tech that become insane at the first feel of power. They just often have a higher impact. Just look at the corporate world. The amount of power tripping managers is pretty high as well.
Confluence of stress burnout, and character traits.
Is worthwhile to explore both the psychological and societal precursors to such.
… Probably worthwhile looking into narcissism too. Albeit many perspectives on the topic, there are common themes and distinct insights to catch, that are sometimes difficult to really have sink in, so distinct and alient an umwelt exists behind the contrastingly “normal” facade. Until blow-out.
… Probably worthwhile looking into autism too. Maybe AuDHD specifically (whom are the majority). The absence of the socially normativising stuff, from the different neurophysiology, almost like we’re having to do all the work of the cerebelum, the gpu, in the forebrain, the cpu, with the neuronal journeys having more finegrain, less pruning, and fewer main reinforced trunks, and so experience far more of the intricate detail all the way there, and all the way back… it’s not just exhausting in itself, the extra brain power required for all the meta-navigation, only having the intricacies of side roads of working-it-out-now, none of the popular motorways of presumption, but also exhausting from the resultant clashes, and the cassandra syndrome, putting up with a majority who dismiss what you see in preference for their shared reality, regardless of how well it can be seen otherwise… no judgement on who’s right or wrong there, only a consideration of what it’s like, having to live like that. … I can imagine that adds a whole other dimension of burnout to be experienced. And then when having found something that can accommodate you, avails a space where you’re finally allowed the control you need to soothe your fine-grain sensitivities from that different awareness frequency range, gives you that peace, and then that area expands back into the social space, where there’s still a different umwelt clash, each modality appearing stupid to the metrics of the other modality. And in the absence of support nor aptitude in that other’s stubborn paradigm, for your own stubborn paradigm, whether you try to brashly persist in your integrity, or you try to bend to fit, it exhausts, either way. And then melt-downs and rage-attacks and so on can happen. Especially when got so close to it, and identified with it, this new thing you made that availed you such grace, that could save the world, that’s part of you… and then these ungrateful swine come along and threaten it!? Yeah, I can see how such blow-outs could come about.
Especially bad if one has both autism and narcissism. The narcissism would preclude their any will whatsoever to self improvement. They’d have total aversion to accountability. No real introspection, and thus no real regret or apology is possible. Only pretence. If even that. Sometimes the grandiosity slips out of the mask of even the most covert narcissists (and community narcissists, martyr hero narcissists, vulnerable narcissists, etc). Narcissists, especially the true ones, where it has become their personality, and not just a rare incidental moment or rarer trait, in having itpped past the point of introspection, into delusional non-reality in fantasy love of their self image, no longer able to distinguish other people as other people, seeing them only as means to their own ends, and lingering in that, growing more machiavelian, psychopathic, even sadistic and demented. And in a way, a bit of a saving grace for us all, if the autism’s louder than the socially manipulative covert machiavellianisms. Better the devil we can see [because they lack the social aptitude to hide], than the devil we cannot see [because they hide among us, pretending to be the paragons of virtue].
Do you think it’s skill or just vibe code?
Oh, it’s skill alright. If we look at e.g. Empress who was bonkers insane at the end, she was the only one far and wide who was actually able to crack Denuvos antitamper at that moment in time, a task many believed to be actually impossible.
