Imagine a tech conference having no CFP, as they reach out to speakers directly. They successfully attract some of the most heavy hitter men speakers in tech, and 3 women speakers.
Now imagine my surprise that 2 of those women are FAKE profiles.
They do not exist.
Nada.
I contacted speakers I know about this.
They had no idea.
One of the fake women profiles is supposedly a core Ethereum contributor, and a staff engineer at Coinbase.
No such contributor, no one heard of her at Coinbase now or before.
Why do this?
Sad to say but going forward if you are invited to speak at a lesser-know conference: do your diligence… if other listed speakers actually exist?!
This is a paid online conference, large number of (paid) attendees, workshops sold out.
What a mess.
Just to be very clear this is about the organisers creating fake profiles.
To spell it out why this conference generated fake women speakers. Because the organizer wants big names and it probably seemed like an easy way to address their diversity concerns.
Well, where Anna Boyko, Staff engineer at Coinbase and Ethereum core contributor is a speaker.
Her. She doesn’t exist. Except as a listed speaker at a prominent online conference!
Or another Java conference by the exact same organizer where Microsoft MVP and WhatsApp senior engineer Alina Prokhoda is a featured speaker.
Would you know there is no such Microsoft MVP and Meta employee.
Speakers listed on these conference had no idea I talked with…
This conference doesn’t have a call for papers because they follow the “Hollywood principle” (that sounds made up btw)
But then do AI generated images, fake names and titles for some fake women speakers profiles… and I cannot fathom WHY.
Absolute laziness and dubious ethics.
If you bought tickets to DevTernity (“DevTernity”) on 7-8 Dec you’ve been duped with fake speaker Anna Boyle who is still on the website. A made up profile, AI image, no such staff eng at Coinbase.
And some other listed women speakers don’t actually talk
And if you are planning to buy tickets to JDKon 2024 (#1 international conference designed specifically for professional Java developers.) on 22-24 May 2024: save your money because Alina Prokhoda doesn’t exist either.
Anything organized by “Dev events” is by the same organizer who creates these fake women speakers (and has some in the past as well) for some mysterious reason.
All their conferences:
I would avoid like the plague with such dubious ethics.
What do you know - after being called out, the organizer is removing some fake women profiles.
Here’s the archived website. Fake Anna Boyle (staff eng at a Coinbase, core Ethereum contributor) was there for only 10 months, while most tickets were sold.
The website had a public GitHub repo where you could see the full edit history that someone found and pointed to me.
You could see eg how fake Anna was added 10 months ago. Or how after being called out for what it is, the organizer removed fake women speaker profiles.
The organizer responded, claiming he tried so hard to get women speakers but it’s… too hard. For a paid (!) conference w a price of €789 / $870 per person.
Meanwhile others just… invite a variety of people, including so many women. They exist. If you actually care that is.
The conference website is up and fake Anna removed.
But fake Julia is still there. Listed every year as a speaker, never delivered a talk any year (and “dropped out” this year as well) @lizthegrey did some digging.
@lizthegrey The organizer claims they 1x accidentally added a fake speaker to their conferences. But actually:
2021 & 2022: fake Natalie & Julia
2023: fake Anna, Alina & Julia
All listed as speakers. Never delivered a talk. Not removed from the site till this thread.
Once a mistake, sure.
@lizthegrey Several speakers cancelled, already let the organizer know they won’t present.
I don’t blame them for not wanting to endorse a conference with a history of catfishing with fake women speakers for years.
As fast as the organizer was to remove fake Anna, they are still listed.
@lizthegrey Conference page lists speakers who have cancelled. Several others have asked to be removed.
No one with a sense of integrity will want to be associated with such a conference. One where organisers created fake speakers for 3 years in a row and still deny there was a problem.
@lizthegrey Speakers have been cancelling en masse and asking the organizer to disassociate them from DevTernity and JDKon. They are still on the site so are making it clear in public they have no further association.
Imagine duping such high profile folks. What was this organizer thinking.
@lizthegrey For years, this conference series (DevTernity, JDKon) has been duping speakers who care about diversity and nominate underrepresented speakers for non-diverse lineups.
Obviously on top of duping customers paying ~$800 per ticket for speakers who do not exist.
This thread started as fake speaker accounts at DevTernity and JDKon.
It ends with what is very likely a catfishing Instagram account operated for 5 years: Coding Unicorn. Growing it to 115K Insta followers to promote the conference.
Wow: card POS payments seem to be down across the Netherlands. Huge queues at cash machines, because most people don’t carry cash. Piles of food at supermarket checkouts because people could not pay.
Unclear what is happening. Is it some banks? All banks?
Anyone w more details?
I could pay for dinner, but couldn’t pay for ice cream after - but had cash. Checked my bank’s website (ING) which said no outages. So assumed it’s the shop.
Then saw queues at cash machines. Friends shared about the supermarket situation.
Surprisingly anecdotal, all of it!
As per this site, 30-40% of card transactions seem to fail, across the country:
It’s a bug deal because cash usage is tiny: everyone relies on cards. Many shops don’t even take cash!
With a much smaller eng team than before, it only makes sense to update the codebase to make it easier for the team to move fast. Sounds like tons of work - and already happening! Impressive.
Engineering doesn’t feel like the biggest challenge X has. Not even top 3.
- Advertisers. What is the goal here? Does X want them to come or push them away?
- Content moderation. What is the strategy? Eg the erotic spam everywhere.
- Roadmap. What is X aiming to be? “Everything” feels way too vague.
It was always clear the smaller engineering team would rebuild the site’s infra for their needs. This is me assuming this will eventually happen (right when EM bought Twitter and did mass layoffs).
Sounds like the eng team finally has the bandwidth to do this in earnest:
Sony published the shooter game Helldivers 2 on PS5 and PC in February. Apparently a very good game, massive success with the potential to be the game of the year 2024.
This week, Sony no banned PC customers in 150+ countries from playing the game they bought.
They made the change that Helldivers 2 players need to have a PlayStation Network account. So PC gamers need to have a PlayStation and use this account to sign in.
But ~170 countries have no PSN support by Sony!!! Even ones that have: PC gamers usually don’t have a PS4/PS5!
Oh wow this decision reversed just a few hours ago.
Who thought this was in any way sensible business decision? (It wasn’t)
If Sony wants a game to only be playable on the PlayStation Network… don’t release to PC?
As I was looking for applications that take up memory on my Mac, I was surprised to find about 6 Adobe Creative Cloud services running, talking ~500MB of memory.
Not used Creative Cloud in ~3.5 years. I'm not a customer anymore.
Yet it's been using my resources all this time...
Uninstaller tells me it has an error removing the apps. When launching Creative Cloud, it prompts me to log in. Which I don't want to do (not sure what my details are).
So why are so many processes silently running for years? It's a waste of my resources and a waste of Adobe's.
I force killed the Creative Cloud processes and manually deleted all Adobe files in my utilities folder. Hopefully that will solve it.
It's annoying that the default approach by Adobe is not "do you have a subscription? If not --> let's NOT run our processes b/c it's pointless."
Noncompetes are now banned: not just in California (like before), but nationwide. Very, very relevant for anyone at Amazon (which is the Big Tech that has enforced noncompetes even for low-level engineering positions).
The source:
Other countries should take notice. The FTC has correctly determined that noncompetes is bad for the economy: although undeniably good for businesses that want to keep wages lower, and enforce lower attrition.ftc.gov/news-events/ne…
As proof of how good having *no* noncompetes are for the economy:
California was one of the only states banning noncompetes.
Also the hotbed for innovative tech companies. Highest median tech compensation across the US. Best place to start an innovative business.