Lukewh

@lukewh
47 Followers
30 Following
135 Posts
Engineering Manager @ Canonical.
❤️ Ubuntu - 🇪🇺 U.K.
LukewhJul 5, 2024
Neil CraigJul 4, 2024
Here's a few of the prep tasks we've done for the UK General Election in/around our team:
- Add extra CDN/peering capacity
- Ensure personal & machine credentials & TLS cert work & won't expire
- Raise service quotas for safety
- Check that deployment pipeline are clean/deployable
- Ask 3rd parties to be extra-vigilant on change requests
- Rehearse failovers to backup systems
- Make sure all logging/metrics are working correctly
Probably mainly/all pretty obvious but maybe useful.
#BBC #GE2024
LukewhJun 3, 2024
nathans Jun 2, 2024

Stop driving WOKE cars and ride a bike like a PATRIOT today

#Meme #Transit #Biking #BikeToot #Bicycle

LukewhMay 28, 2024
Daryl FeehelyMay 27, 2024

This is art.
Maith thú @Tupp_ed

"It's not painful to watch this guy and his party fail. This is going to be great."

https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-death-march/?attribution_id=6652f4d77890af0001bd6ef6

The Gist: The Death March

The UK Prime Minister decided to call an election. Then he stepped outside to tell everyone about it and it all went downhill from there. This is the Gist.

The Gist
LukewhMay 24, 2024
DjangoCon US  May 23, 2024

Did you know that there only 8 more days until the early bird ticket sales end? You do now. If you need a nudge in the right direction, here's another #DjangoConUS experience.

Today's highlight is from @nessita, Django Fellow!

https://2024.djangocon.us/tickets/

DjangoCon US Tickets

Information about buying tickets to DjangoCon US

DjangoCon US
LukewhApr 25, 2024
javiApr 23, 2024
offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.
The Man Who Killed Google Search

Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. UPDATE: Prabhakar has now been deposed as head of search, read here for more details. This is the story

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
LukewhFeb 25, 2024
Tim McNamaraFeb 25, 2024
Do you know anyone who wants to watch #rustlang live stream on a Sunday afternoon/evening? Let's implement Pascal's Triangle https://discord.gg/mgUbpguz?event=1211107767281262653
Join the CLICKS LOUNGE Discord Server!

Check out the CLICKS LOUNGE community on Discord – hang out with 1019 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

Discord
LukewhFeb 14, 2024
Show threadMatias PiipariFeb 13, 2024
Just fixed up CUDA support in revision 10 of the #ollama snap package (`snap refresh ollama` to get it asap if you already installed it and cannot wait), dolphin-mixtral now does 38 tokens/s on my home workstation 🧑‍🔬
LukewhDec 20, 2023
2023 the year of "your year in review" for every product in your life.
LukewhDec 16, 2023
Graham MorrisonDec 15, 2023
"I'm impressed. How many questions does it usually take to spot them?" (I had a lot of fun doing this) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKZ4s-Q5hsQ
Skynet or Star Trek, what’s the future of AI?

YouTube
LukewhOct 7, 2023
Daniele ProcidaOct 6, 2023

I've published https://vurt.eu/articles/on-safety/ - my perspective on safety for attendees at African Python community events.

I wrote it because I was troubled by some of the responses I have heard to the idea of a DjangoCon Africa -https://2023.djangocon.africa - in a country such as Tanzania.

It's right that questions about safety should be asked. But when they're asked, they must be answered consistently and fairly - and not used to damage or undermine African open-source software communities.

A perspective on attendee safety at Python community events - Daniele Procida