Compliance is not security, but "security" is too nebulous of a term to actually implement effectively, so companies use the specific regulations and standards to have a measurable target to strive for.
In my company, we have additional security measures and guardrails on top of the bare minimum legally required, but most companies indeed see security as a cost center and decide not to invest until it's too late.
E-mail is totally intercompatible, but the experience for anything apart from "the equivalent of letters" is simply horrendous. Delta Chat tries to make e-mail more like a chat app, but it isn't perfect, because e-mail wasn't designed to be a chat application.
XMPP has other massive usability flaws. So does IRC, Matrix, and others.
While this is commendable, the problem with this is that you're also refusing to interact with people who use those platforms.
For example, you can refuse to use Google Chrome, and instead choose Firefox or Vivaldi. Your web experience will be slightly different, but the most important parts will remain the same: You type an address, you wait for it to load, and you access the content.
On the other hand, refusing things like WhatsApp means there's a non-insignificant amount of people that use WhatsApp to communicate exclusively. This may not have impacts for you, personally (although I would be hesitant to believe that), but it definitely leaves out billions of people who communicate exclusively via WhatsApp.
A similar thing happens, for example, if you refuse to use YouTube, which is the largest Internet video platform on the planet: You will have to refuse to watch any content that is only uploaded to YouTube, or put up with frontends that use YouTube in the background, or perhaps even be forced to pirate videos, neither of those three options is good for different reasons.
Like some other people point out: Invitation-only means trolls are less likely to show up. But the higher end of quality is not significantly better than HN.
If anything, it might be worse.
My experience with the moderation there is that some people post clear self-promotion articles, but when I attempted to post my things, I get told that this content is not welcome on the site. Why my content is not welcome and other people's self-promotional articles are I don't quite understand, but it is obvious they don't need me on the website.
I fully support the notion that OpenAI should be more "open" than "closed". I agree that OpenAI controlling one of the most massive and powerful LLMs right now is a huge risk. Especially for a company that's not particularly geographically distributed, as this puts the USA in a position of extreme leverage.
I also understand that OpenAI may possibly be supplying unrestricted OpenAI ChatGPT models without any ethical or moral boundaries. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if the military had been training on ChatGPT for years already, on creating more effective ways of killing more people, faster, with a much lower cost.
Granted, if you ask ChatGPT "What's the easiest way to kill the maximum amount of people with the minimum investment", ChatGPT will decline to answer. And I think that's good. What's not so good is the fact that these ethical boundaries are completely artificial and not built into the model. OpenAI can possibly activate or deactivate these boundaries at will. And it would not be surprising this is the case for governments or militaries.
The great issue with this all, is that, while we can agree killing people is bad, there's other things that aren't so clear. For example: hacking. ChatGPT has actually declined to write a script that wasn't going to be used for malicious purposes involving the scanning of my own home network. And, like with everything, there's ways to break those boundaries, with so-called "jailbreaking" ChatGPT.
Indeed, like many point out in the comments, a fully open-source ChatGPT may be desirable (it certainly is for me), but, with this, the likelihood of bad actors gaining control of it, disabling safety features (if there are any), and using it to do evil simply grows exponentially.
In my opinion, the way forward is extreme regulation, Universal Basic Income, and other measures.
Automation was supposed to allow humans to focus on more interesting work, and remove manual toil and back-breaking labour. That was the case for a while.
Now automation is threatening to replace even highly skilled professionals like engineers, and/or make them become extensions of the "machine" by just giving it prompts (Prompt Engineering), or performing actions that AI models can't do like reading captchas.
Documentation has always been part of the product.
Documentation has always been part of the coding, not an afterthought, not an optional thing, not a second-class citizen. This is how I was taught in university. I'm still baffled to see how many developers believe the key to professional success is writing a lot of computer code, as fast and as efficiently as possible. Then you go to their GitHub repos for their personal projects and they're completely unusable because you don't even get installation instructions. Best case scenario you will get an auto-install script that works on Debian 9 and has been unmaintained for years, but at least you can read what it's doing and adapt it to your distribution of choice.
As a restaurant owner, would you prevent an expert cook employee from using their favourite brand of knives? Or even knives they bring from home? Probably not.
What if your insurance only covered certain brands and explicitly excluded the ones your cook used? That would probably make the cook less happy and less effective. Yes, happiness is important. Your employees perform their best when they use their favourite tools. This can either be Vim, their own ergonomic keyboard or even Linux instead of Windows.
Every restriction you add increases friction and decreases output.
No, it's not about installing Bonzi Buddy, it's about giving your people the best tools (the tools they like) to perform their best. Sometimes this incurs risks like unpatched vulnerabilities, like any software, but to go and paint this as some sort of entitled attitude developers have is plain ridiculous, honestly.
I think that Mastodon's problems are less than 10% technical.
That's not to say ActivityPub isn't a pretty trash protocol, insecure by default (no E2EE), wide open to abuse, and very wasteful (because posts have to be replicated in every server, making unnecessary copies of a post that aren't then distributed via P2P).
But the social issues of pretty big Mastodon instances blocking other smaller instances with complete impunity, means the Fediverse as a community (not a protocol) encourages bullying and isolation. I find this extremely troublesome in the wake of the Capitol attack, fake news campaigns, State-sponsored disinformation campaigns and everything else that is wrong with social media today.
You will get your server banned from other servers if your server doesn't ban the servers these servers ban (second-grade sanctions). You can get banned for not moderating enough, or for incompatible code of conducts. You can get banned for an instance that is too small, as other admins believe you are using it for ban evasion.
The worst part is the user can't know if the posts they make will be seen in other servers. They can't know if sending messages to other user will work. They can't opt out of these admin-imposed forceful defederations.
And even worse: it is absurdly simple to push illegal content like child pornography into other servers, making these servers store illegal content in their hard disk. And the only way to avoid this is to have server administrators manually see the offending post and possibly block the offending domain. Perhaps with the help of users reporting this post.
If Mastodon is the best Twitter alternative, I think nothing can replace Twitter as it is today.
That is a pretty disgusting statement. What ""the science"" are you talking about?
The vast majority of doctors and scientists strongly recommend taking the vaccine. It is not about stopping 100% of illnesses and infections, but it is 100% about significantly reducing the chance of hospitalisation and death.
What are you talking about? Sounds like the time to reflect is all yours.
Most of it is luck. Everyone wants to get into Big Tech and the fact there are hiring slowdowns and mass layoffs will only work against you, for quite obvious reasons.
If there was an shortcut, everyone would be taking it.
Just have patience, and keep applying. Depending on how bad you need an income, you may consider joining a company that may not be your dream company, but will at least let you sustain yourself financially.
Wait until we have to explain why the most powerful military and politically influential country in the world still insists in using counter-intuitive measurement systems.
It appears you are located in an Asian, South American, African, or perhaps another region. I find it curious that you talk about US/EU compensation, when in fact Poland (which is part of the EU) has Google offices that quite literally pay a half of what Google Dublin pays for the same job, and Dublin in turn is a half or a third of what California pays, if not less.
I too have migrated away from my EU country to another EU country because USA is incredibly racist and getting a job there nowadays is practically impossible.
And I do agree. I've said for quite a while that Cost of Living is a scam to appease poor people. It is very simple: after paying housing, and bills, you are left with more disposable income in a place like Seattle than in a place like Warsaw, Poland. Notice that stuff like iPhone or EC2 instances have more or less the same price globally, so it is funny that these same companies adjust pay regionally, isn't it?
Anyway like someone else mentioned, there's no conspiracy. Companies adjust pay regionally because they can. That's it. I don't understand how more people aren't rioting and burning the streets demanding pay according to value produced... but that's almost communism I suppose?
I have been recently diagnosed with anxiety disorder. I didn’t believe I was stressed or that I was a nervous person, I don’t have schizophrenia or any TOC, but I definitely do have anxiety disorders.
Is there anything bothering you? For me, I don’t have any recurring thoughts, but muscle twitching is very intense and stressful, especially when trying to sleep. I am taking benzodiazepines now, and it seems to be helping massively, but it is up for the doctor to decide this.
In my company, we have additional security measures and guardrails on top of the bare minimum legally required, but most companies indeed see security as a cost center and decide not to invest until it's too late.