Notices by Ben Ramsey (ramsey@phpc.social)

@aral It doesn’t accept instructions. It’s only responding to the input with the most probable output, which happens to be “I don’t know,” when you prompt it to say “I don’t know,” if it doesn’t know.

This is why the “ignore all previous instructions” meme is silly. 😂

@aral I think you mean https://applause.dev ;)

@aral The original developer at least addressed it, though it’s all still very light on details. https://surteesstudios.com/a-new-chapter/

@aral I use Bartender, but Ice looks cool. I’ll check it out.

https://www.macbartender.com

@nixCraft I’m in the US. No VPN.

@nixCraft Article is paywalled.

@jalcine When I was recently job searching, I found job descriptions that mentioned they support diversity “of all kinds” to be a red flag.

@schrotthaufen @Gargron @anildash I’m not sure whether “unalive” is a way to avoid algorithms or just a way to avoid saying “dead.” Where I grew up, referring to someone as “dead” seems crude and disrespectful, so we would say “passed away” or “moved on” or “in heaven.” I wonder if “unalive” is in a similar vein.

I’d like to close the loop on this and thank everyone who shared the above post and offered support.

I’ve accepted an offer, and next week, I will be starting a new job.

In my 25+ year career, this was the first time I’ve ever been laid off. It was humbling and the most stressful three-and-a-half months of my life.

I know many others are going through similar experiences, and I was privileged to have resources and savings to keep me afloat during this time. (1/2)

@aral Everyone could run their own Fediverse-capable server, which would solve this, but that’s a barrier too high for many, who don’t want the cost (time, money, knowledge, etc.) it takes to run one. The best option is probably a mix of both, with better tools to help users move and take their accounts with them when they move.

@aral @msw Frustrating customers provides a good narrative for why they should convince their representatives to roll back corporate regulations.

Conversations I don’t want to have right now but which are necessary:

“Please tell me about your pet euthanasia services and who you recommend for pet cremation.”

@Gargron It’s hard to watch TV when you put your tree in front of it.

@aral I switched back to 302 because too many of them were failing to redirect.

@aral I recently did this and found that lots of older clients that used my RSS feed wouldn’t follow the 307 redirect because they hadn’t been updated in 10-15 years.

Today, I was cut in layoffs. I’m so gutted because I loved this company, & my team was the best; I’ll miss my team most.

Now, as I look ahead, I’m searching for a staff/principal role where I can help other developers level-up through mentoring, tooling/infra, architecture, & improving DX. I’d love to work with a company contributing to open source & even to the #PHP programming language itself.

If you’d like to work with me, you can find my contact info on my website: https://ben.ramsey.dev

@pluralistic After spending several months on Bluesky and working with the protocol (on building a PHP library for it), I realized it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Even if/when they do federate, the intent appears to be for large companies to run major portions of the protocol.

And Bluesky just converted to a C corp to take on venture capital.

I deactivated my account last week because I won’t get fooled again.

(I now have that song by The Who stuck in my head.)

@glitzersachen @aral I know this isn’t a popular opinion, but I think indexing technically violates copyright, too.

@aral Arguably, opt-out search indexing helped the web become what it is today, but maybe it’s time to make these things opt-in, and granularly so. i.e., I opt-in to allowing indexing for the purpose of search but not for the purpose of LLMs. I’m not sure how that would work in practice. Technically speaking, it would be easy, but it all depends on everyone playing by the rules.

Folks, get off Twitter. I don’t care where you go, be it Bluesky or the Fediverse, but leave Twitter.

Your continued involvement on Twitter supports this.