"Last week, a tweet by Stanford researcher Yegor Denisov-Blanch went viral within Silicon Valley. “We have data on the performance of >50k engineers from 100s of companies,” he tweeted. “~9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing: Ghost Engineers.”

Denisov-Blanch said that tech companies have given his research team access to their internal code repositories (their internal, private Githubs, for example) and, for the last two years, he and his team have been running an algorithm against individual employees’ code. He said that this automated code review shows that nearly 10 percent of employees at the companies analyzed do essentially nothing, and are handsomely compensated for it. There are not many details about how his team’s review algorithm works in a paper about it, but it says that it attempts to answer the same questions a human reviewer might have about any specific segment of code, such as:

“How difficult is the problem that this commit solves? How many hours would it take you to just write the code in this commit assuming you could fully focus on this task? How well structured is this source code relative to the previous commits? Quartile within this list How maintainable is this commit?”

Ghost Engineers, as determined by his algorithm, perform at less than 10 percent of the median software engineer (as in, they are measured as being 10 times worse/less productive than the median worker)."

<https://www.404media.co/are-overemployed-ghost-engineers-making-six-figures-to-do-nothing/>

#SoftwareDevelopment #GhostEngineers #Surveillance #Overemployment #Programming

"Workers should have the right to know which of their data is being collected, who it's being shared by, and how it's being used. We all should have that right. That's what the actors' strike was partly motivated by: actors who were being ordered to wear mocap suits to produce data that could be used to produce a digital double of them, "training their replacement," but the replacement was a deepfake.

With a Trump administration on the horizon, the future of the FTC is in doubt. But the coalition for a new privacy law includes many of Trumpland's most powerful blocs – like Jan 6 rioters whose location was swept up by Google and handed over to the FBI. A strong privacy law would protect their Fourth Amendment rights – but also the rights of BLM protesters who experienced this far more often, and with far worse consequences, than the insurrectionists.

The "we do it with an app, so it's not illegal" ruse is wearing thinner by the day. When you have a boss for an app, your real boss gets an accountability sink, a convenient scapegoat that can be blamed for your misery.

The fact that this makes you worse at your job, that it loses your boss money, is no guarantee that you will be spared. Rich people make great marks, and they can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Markets won't solve this one – but worker power can."

<https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/26/hawtch-hawtch/#you-treasure-what-you-measure>

#Work #WageSlavery #WorkerSurveillance #Bossware #Privacy #AI #DataProtection #FTC #USA

This may be true for tech writers who work for large companies, but not necessarily for the vast majority of cases...

"In technical writing roles, you have a surprising ability to focus your efforts on documentation projects you believe in. I have about 60+ documentation bugs sitting in my queue. Which ones do I work on? Which do I prioritize? If a product has an upcoming release, sure, I make sure we have docs for those features. Or if partners are complaining loudly about an issue, I also prioritize those fixes. But beyond those P0 type bugs, there’s a lot of leeway to ignore some products and prioritize others. Making that judgment call could be more significant than the quality of documentation you write. In other words, instead of focusing so much on documentation quality, focus on documentation priority. Are you working on products that matter to the company? That decision might matter more in your promotion efforts than the quality of documentation you write."

<https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/reading-lynch-focus-on-high-priority-projects>

#TechnicalWriting #SoftwareDocumentation #SoftwareDevelopment #Docs #Programming

"I’ve developed the impression that, as humanists in tech, technical writers are constantly subjected to the pull of two separate forces. One is eminently technological, embodied by the Developer-Maker; the other is communicational, represented by the Writer-Storyteller. I see you muttering “Woz &amp; Jobs” in glee while reading about those profiles, and you wouldn’t be too far off, despite how trite those stereotypes have become over time. For the sake of the discussion, let’s assume that they’ve always been there.

If you represented both forces in a diagram, you’d get something like the following: the Developer strain diverging from the initial trunk towards more engineering-colored shades of writing, and the second strain, the Writer’s, moving towards meaning and connection and away from explaining buttons and menus. As UIs become more self-explanatory, and coding more accessible, writers pursue deeper specialization, and so the tech writer becomes an API writer and then a Docs Engineer, for example.

I think it’s still entirely possible to remain at the center as a full-stack writer, but it’s becoming harder due to the way job titles convey expectations and foster teamwork. It’s easier for tech writers to embed with engineers if they carry the engineer sobriquet, as it’s simpler to work with designers if you attach the UX patch to your business card. It’s all meant to say “I understand and respect your work, let’s collaborate”. And since technical writing is a landing pad, switching between those sides isn’t impossible."

<https://passo.uno/what-is-a-documentation-engineer/>

#TechnicalWriting #SoftwareDocumentation #DocumentationEngineering #Docs #SoftwareDevelopment #Programming

"The civil rights organization European Digital Rights (EDRi) is making serious accusations against the EU Commission regarding the agreement on data sharing with the USA. Eleven years after the Snowden revelations and the associated outcry, mass surveillance is simply continuing based on the EU-US data protection framework, the umbrella organization complains. The EU now appears to have adopted an attitude of "business as usual", which suggests at least a certain tolerance of the ongoing mass collection of information on internet users by certain countries, such as the USA."

<https://www.heise.de/en/news/Rights-activists-EU-US-data-exchange-undermines-fundamental-rights-10081843.html>

#EU #USA #DataSharing #DataProtection #Surveillance #Privacy #FundamentalRights

"For determined hackers, sitting in a car outside a target's building and using radio equipment to breach its Wi-Fi network has long been an effective but risky technique. These risks became all too clear when spies working for Russia's GRU military intelligence agency were caught red-handed on a city street in the Netherlands in 2018 using an antenna hidden in their car's trunk to try to hack into the Wi-Fi of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Since that incident, however, that same unit of Russian military hackers appears to have developed a new and far safer Wi-Fi hacking technique: Instead of venturing into radio range of their target, they found another vulnerable network in a building across the street, remotely hacked into a laptop in that neighboring building, and used that computer's antenna to break into the Wi-Fi network of their intended victim—a radio-hacking trick that never even required leaving Russian soil.

At the Cyberwarcon security conference in Arlington, Virginia, today, cybersecurity researcher Steven Adair will reveal how his firm, Volexity, discovered that unprecedented Wi-Fi hacking technique—what the firm is calling a “nearest neighbor attack"—while investigating a network breach targeting a customer in Washington, DC, in 2022. Volexity, which declined to name its DC customer, has since tied the breach to the Russian hacker group known as Fancy Bear, APT28, or Unit 26165."

<https://www.wired.com/story/russia-gru-apt28-wifi-daisy-chain-breach/>

#CyberSecurity #Russia #StateHacking #FancyBear #APT28 #Wifi

"Niantic, the company behind the extremely popular augmented reality mobile games Pokémon Go and Ingress, announced that it is using data collected by its millions of players to create an AI model that can navigate the physical world.

In a blog post published last week, first spotted by Garbage Day, Niantic says it is building a “Large Geospatial Model.” This name, the company explains, is a direct reference to Large Language Models (LLMs) Like OpenAI’s GPT, which are trained on vast quantities of text scraped from the internet in order to process and produce natural language. Niantic explains that a Large Geospatial Model, or LGM, aims to do the same for the physical world, a technology it says “will enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces, but also to interact with them in new ways, forming a critical component of AR glasses and fields beyond, including robotics, content creation and autonomous systems. As we move from phones to wearable technology linked to the real world, spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system.”"

<https://www.404media.co/pokemon-go-players-have-unwittingly-trained-ai-to-navigate-the-world/>

#Niantic #Pokemon #AR #AugmentedReality #AI #LGM

#Nintendo