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Changing careers to Unix Hedgewizard
I live in a hut in the woods near a small town, trading refurbished laptops for potpies and broken tech, and am sought out by the Big Tech Nobility to solve problems they cannot fathom, and I demand a price that teaches them humility


Naming the Service Industry Language: Passive Autoaggression

Doing your best to blame no one, in a way where the listener can pretend you blamed yourself.

Policed when either passive or auto get too low, punished when they get too high.

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boto3.amazonaws.com/v1/documentati…
Boto3's documents were written by a person who had done technical writing before?

The formatting would be better if they'd used readthedocs.io, a website designed to harm documentation



"I ain't taking that COVID vaccine because the government's going to spy on me with microchips, and making me take it for public health reasons is a violation of my privacy rights!"
Can we have your kid's entire DNA profile instead in a dubiously secure database?
"Heck yeah."

https://nitter.net/NBCNews/status/1582556412059738113

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This is when the PFY LARTs the BOFH.


And just the other day it felt like the English were mourning the loss of a monster named Liz


Being the English, they have all formed a queue and are taking their turns for their 15 minutes each in Parliment

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@HippyWizard Y'all ever see a CDN cache the responses from the healthcheck endpoint?

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If all the servers say they are down, but it seems to be working anyway, it's fine, right?


Day 2 of production outage:
Coworker who might be the only person who can solve the problem "This is only in staging, right?"


Asking an older toddler a question do be like

Me: "do you want blankets or sheets?" (For making a fort)
Shæ: "I want paint! And glue! And glitter!"

Like I have a plan because parenting but.... i still don't know about the sheets or blankets question
Perfect rainy day activity to get sheets from the second hand store and decorate them with paint and glitter and other things, I think. We just need to make sure we get lots of glow in the dark materials


The nice part of Telehealth Ontario is that now you can effectively look up your symptoms on WebMD *and* be on hold


Anyone else know tfw you want to do a house task like 100x more than another house task but you must do the second task first so you feel paralyzed because the second task is hitting my executive dysfunction marker...

Just me? Ah, yeah :/
I did manage to do it at least, just took a while


The reason Meta can't get their VR working until the legs is because the Block chain

Everyone knows it stands for Not For Torso


Using ssh like a weird bespoke inet - uh - that's the coolest shit ever
Though it is the prelude to "those who cannot remember the OSI are doomed to reimplement it, badly, over HTTP SSH"



"you can't threaten to destroy priceless artifacts and artworks just to make a point about climate change" - people who say nothing about priceless rock art and sacred sites being destroyed for pipelines and mines

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I'm not a fan of throwing soup on art, and would have preferred it if they'd thrown the soup on an oil executive or one of their bought politicians, but I have to admit that the points about caring more about art than about the world are excellent.
They threw the soup on glass near at

Also - wait until you find out what pipelines are doing to native art!

Wait until you find out what climate change is doing to galleries and museums!


Slowly watching Sean die internally while he reads something unknown on his feed
MedTech VCs should at least know what the word holistic means and how it is differentiated from natural
Any sentence containing the words "VCs should at least know" is, probabilistically speaking, just setting you up for disappointment.
I spend every holiday dinner getting told how good at their jobs VCs are! The fact that my lack of faith is correct is *worse*.
I mean, their job is "make a lot of bets at on-average-favorable odds", and (especially in environments where there's a lot of money sloshing around to buy companies at post-VC stages) it's not hard to be good at that without actually knowing anything useful.
There are absolutely no requirement for becoming VC except money. The complete antithesis of meritocracy. Which they also are wrong about.
I know

I really should be less involved in VC culture - but my life kinda makes it impossible to be


My full name is Rebecca

I said to Sean, "you have recently decided to call me by my full name"
Sean: "Robecca. It's now our sons name"
Me: "poor Rowan"
Please for the love of everything lovely, Do NOT call me Rebecca
Duly noted. I also have a weird repulsion to being called my full birth name. Possibly because it was used by teachers to call me out in class.


Talking with a coworker:
"I would show you my calculator but it's reverse polish notation so it probably wont help"
Me, opening the HP-41CX emulator on my phone to do routine calculations
Principal Skinner meme. Top panel shows him thinking "Am I weird?" Bottom panel shows him responding "No, it's the neurotypicals who are wrong"
See, my problem is that "dc" is really fast to type into a terminal!


@Jonathan Lamothe (he/him) just watched your video on cold brew coffee.... thinking this method might be exactly what I need in my life 😄 as my cold brew pitcher just shattered

Away to the dollar store (in the morning)!
Hilariously, that video is also how I learned to make cold brew. >.<


Is there any good group cartography tools for RPGs?

We tried a few like https://hextml.playest.net/ but it got pretty stressful and the exports are hard to read

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I really just wanna make my sessions be a lot of bad map making and graffiti on those maps!



putting obscenities in your debug prints makes them work better

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I really want to think about the semantics of web index and search engine
I'm looking forward to the "no results on 1st page" event happening.
lol - sure - that's definitely a problem :D


email$ sudo find . -type f -exec dd if={} of=/dev/null \;

Ya'll ever wanted to put your entire Maildir into ARC to make your load times fast on the webmail?

@maddiefuzz what's the estimated ETA on the PIN number being entered into the ATM machine

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Throughout the pandemic, my sister's fam and I have been novid together, but now she has covid 😔

Slowly everyone I know except us has been hit at least once 😔


Thinking about that time I worked for a family babysitting their small child. I was just thinking of maybe confiding in then my mental illness because I hate to keep that hidden and I tend to share it earlier rather than later if I feel like maybe I can.

Anyway, the mother decided to confide in me first how they had a previous babysitter who they got along with really well until she told them she had bipolar. Then they were nervous she would be dangerous when she took care of their kid, and were relieved when she quit soon after.

Needless to say, this ended up being another mark on the page of Wait To Confide for me because uh, ablism is not fun and I don’t need it directed to me.

It makes me think sometimes. I think about stigma and ablism but I also think of my power of being able to hide it all. That I have an invisible disability. Nobody ever guesses. There has been exactly 1 person who said he'd wondered: my thesis advisor in clinical psych for my undergrad thesid because of my intensity of interest in my area of research (bipolar).


We get so caught up in the question "What if social media is bad?" we never really ask the question "What if we replaced it?"
I have so very much to say, ironically this is not the forum.🤔
IT IS! I'M MY OWN ADMIN! If your admin complains and I'll instance block them and call them a meanie (not really)!
@silverwizard@convenient.em No nothing like that, but all alright a preview then.

Replacement.
Social Media did not spring forth from nothing in the recent past, for some the concept has been real for their entire lifespan. The medium changes names, ownership, format protocol, speed and reach. It is replaced, updated, augmented, or taken out back and shot in the head ( :googleplus: ) as needed.

Is there a need for replacement?

of protocol?
of format?
of owner?

or

Can existing technology be leveraged to augment and enhance the usage of social media as a valuable service and resource for the users regardless of protocol, format, owner, admin, or walled garden digital prison choices?

I say No, maybe, No, Hell No, and Yes.

since you asked.
So I mean, destroying social media is a three headed snake:
Legislative
Technical
Social

We need to have the tools to build things that let us escape corporate control, we must break up monopolies, and disallow groups to force us to give up rights of intercommunication, and we must socially understand that smaller communities are ok, and the ideas of Follower Counts and Viral are toxic.
Globally, you are going to be, at the very best, less than effective at any legislative goal.

Technical and Social are the areas of influence that can be effectively dealt with.

"disallow groups" is already on the wrong foot.

"Not everything is for me" needs to be a fundamental understanding of every user and seems lost in all the noise of every topic.

Treading on the various rights of anyone to setup and run their own social network their own way is kinda invalidating your whole point, isn't it?

Which means no matter how much you may disagree with their format/protocol/admin/monetization/datacollection/owner you give them that right to protect yours.

And no matter how correct your interpretation of the corporate evils and privacy molesting shenanigans, they have users you will not reach that deserve fundamental aspects of social media regardless of their ill informed choices.

2 choices, compete or change everything without changing anything.
I mean, disallowing certain kinds of corporate action is gonna happen

And no - part of this is dealing with the problem of allowing corporations power
Which quiet part? The fact that I'm anticorporation?
Personally, individually we can all be whatever stripe we like. But collectively solving a global problem it is necessary to communicate without a striped agenda. Concentrate on the inarguable and the clearest elegant solution.

Participate when and where it suits your agenda, or inarguably agree & Dissent, protest and act in opposition where you must.

But reality dictates that the clearest solution does not contain critical mass
interested in tossing all of it out and starting over with an particular ideological stripe.

The quiet part is that the eventual result will be changes in ownership/format/protocol/value that financially is often detrimental to the owners of the network of users we wish to be of service and educate.

and it can stay quiet because the same is true without our action or agenda (see waaay above.) the solution entails offering a value add to these various networks, it need not be presented as a dagger, pointy though it may be.
It should be clear to anyone with even a passing interest that any attempt at blanket moderation of human behavior is a fools errand.

This fact is unconcerned with scale, 1 human or a 3 million humans. If you tell them they cannot do a thing, they alone still get to decide to do or not do a thing.

In the "social media age" (Gyahh, I threw up in my mouth a bit, sorry) there is a constant struggle to decide what is and is not allowed, speech, video, image, joke, thought, etc.

And we all get it, "Have some decency damn", but some, in some areas of interest, will always have differing opinions of what is and is not acceptably decent.

Social outrage ensues to varying degrees.
The idea that humans are attracted to Fiction, Horror, Crime, Conspiracy, Violence, Tribal reaffirmation and inhumanity to man is somehow treated as a new evil of the social media algorithm is ludicrous on its face.

Social virality ensues to varying degrees.

These are useful and valuable though sometimes abhorrent pieces of data that are being monetized and manipulated to what many call disastrous consequence.

And there is where we can agree, the inarguable.
(Cannot believe I left SEX out of that list, I guess its true what they say about after you turn 50...)
So the main objective to that is that you have to believe something to change things. You can't build a hypothetical system which pleases everyone, you gotta build something you believe is good.
Inarguably good, no.

Yet any statistical increase in the good from those that choose to participate is "better" than without.

The question is how small do you want that stat to be?

You can increase it without perverting the good, Without painting with a brush that is colored arguably incorrectly bad by some who you are trying to welcome and encourage to participate for the increased common good.

You just have to focus on the attractive good. The inevitable side effects to you may be that good, to others their personal benefit or flexibility or utility are the attractive "good"

Not advocating hiding the motivations. Just been around open source longer than its been called that and witnessed perfectly reasonable intelligent folks throw lifetime's of work out the window over ideological disagreements unrelated to the solution being crafted to the detriment and death of said solution.

It is an important fact to face up front, its on a list...
...

No solution is perfect, everyone is flawed, you can learn something new, you can refine and even discard your beliefs, you are often wrong, mistaken, ignorant, and stubborn. Facts are integral. Your head full of jelly is completely unique, just like everybody else's, So don't get too attached to it's representation of what should be, as to what actually do be, and what can be.
OK, but I don't need to not argue for it. Legislative changes are the only tools we have to cap power.

Obviously as an anarchist I would rather invidivual communities make those decisions, but at an inter-communal level you need some standards. People who build walled gardens should be left to starve in them, not allowed to push more people into them. That's just common sense. And so we must use the most pro-social sanctions to discourage them. Right now that's law.

Banning walled gardens *is* an intermediate step, and the frustrating part is that any reasonable read of antitrust laws show it's an enforcement issue, not even a legislative one!
The walled garden is called that because it is an attractive place to hang out. Its pleasant, undemanding, chill.

Trying to convince the folks inside it that they need to pour this gasoline on it and light it up, well it is an uphill battle.

I'm not arguing against any particular legislative action, I'm saying that actually enacting a common rule on a global scale is impossible at current global economy, geopolitical environment.

I am arguing that the cost benefit analysis says that convincing your legislative representative to cripple his donors is hard enough when he and many of his constituents and colleagues don't have an iPhone in his pocket and is Tweeting on his iPad.
Sure, I agree this is an uphill battle. But I am fairly certain it's a minimum action to maintain a society. Full stop.
That is a very All or Nothing self defeatist attitude though.

Your progress will always be marked as not there yet or all done in a day and be completely dependent on other's action.

That is a way to go, but it sounds like a difficult recruitment speech.

What does the landscape look like along the way? What does it look like at the end? How did you help?

I don't know, I've been working on this problem for more than a decade, and I'm pretty dug in on my approach, which again, not the correct forum to get into (we'd be here for days), but I support everyone's attempts at more just and equitable world, even if I could use a few extra hands.
OK, but what is your support? I believe that as long as we allow people to spend billions to control media as we know it, it's over. The whole game is over.

What other options exist?
The existence of liars does not invalidate the truth.

Globally, you cannot disallow people to spend their resources however they like. (Locally you may be able to enact laws)

These corporations DO exist. They are funded and can spend.

What you want is for them to spend it in ways you agree with.

and now we near going beyond what I am willing to publicly expound on at this stage.

But in a word, USERS.👥
Yes, users should move, and making that easy is important, but also, we can't pretend the social media we have is a valid model.
That is just it, why make that judgement?

It exists.

In the future, something else will, what is important is to enshrine the necessary civic education as part of the experience no matter the medium.

Move them to where? A site deemed "better"?

I'm all for better, but even here, a noticeably better place, is a lot of the same minus some problematic bits removed (this not a criticism). So starting from an agnostic point of view would seem the sensible approach, rather than anything but what we have approach. I prefer the what we could have viewpoint

In that way, migration is not the goal or the ginormous obstacle it appears to be.

Informed choice is the goal. Not losing your workflow while navigating an ever changing digital social space is the goal. Achieving positive social change is the goal.

I don't really care how much cash Jeff and Elon have cuz it wouldn't matter if I did.

I care about their users. Not new prohibitions. Education & empowerment.
Like I started with, we all ask if it's bad, and not if it should be replaced
They don't actually have any power, they have users and money.

Facilitate their users but let users learn through usage that the money, content, data and power always belonged to the user.
See why this is not the correct forum yet?
Wait until you find out what power is!


Feeling frustration at the lack of like, care and understanding some of my family have when I interact with them.

My grandmother's funeral was supposed to be tomorrow. I foumd out 2 weeks ago from my sister. Now it's been posponed, I found out today by asking specifically the person in the know (aka my uncle)
It's a 2h drive and Sean had already taken time off work to come with me. Plus we have two littles
Oof, sorry about that.
Yeah that sucks balls.


Assignment 1 marks are up. If I get a weighted average of 48.6% in the coursework for the rest of the term, I get to graduate on the Dean's Honor List.


Oh. It's going to be one of those courses.
(My 76% on A1 puts me in the 90th percentile. Marker comments either don't say anything about what they were looking for or ask for things that I wrote down right next to where they commented.)


Warhammer 40°K

In the grim coldness of the far future there is barely motion


Accidentally in a discussion of "the Gender Float"


Was talking to an old coworker about what he's working on now over dinner today.

When I said "So you're basically building UUCP", he actually knew what I was talking about. I had thought he was younger than that.


When will covid be ovvveerr??

(I'll fight you if you tell me it's already over)
At this rate, never, we'll start celebrating the apparition of the new strain in the Fall like we used to do with the Harvest because of the regularity.
Words cannot express how I feel about that because like... yeah D:



I am the kind of tired where I told a person the command to run to make it work - and then didn't tell them to read the screenshot they sent me where it said what to do
Nor did I try to explain to them what went wrong

I am that kind of tired
I am still giving *useful* commands
Mine is useful! It solves git pull conflicts!


I'm looking forward to giving out these mid sized tubs of cotton candy for Halloween in all sorts of different flavours. My goal is to have the best candy on the block and I hope this is what the kiddos want. I usually base it on what I'd want too, and I definitely would have been so excited by a cotton candy tub ❤️😄


Trying to tell people the new project is evil so giving it the CIDR of 10.66.6.0/24 for resources


Three year old threw my laptop down the stairs, and the screen replacement costs more than the laptop did. And the other laptop with a broken screen I have is the same way.

Fuck.
Someone has figured out how to not watch his favourite shows as much actually
For the first iPad we got my kid at around 3, we got a cover that added a couple inches to all dimensions and easily prehensile handles. I’m happy to report the iPad is still in use 5 years later.
Yeah, I am using a Microsoft surface tablet running stock debian and xfce as my primary computer these days because I'm Sean Howard and therefore all my decisions have to be bonkers

But I just normally don't let the kids hold it, but put videos on it while on long drives

But he found it and tossed it down the stairs - so I guess it's cover time >.<
@Hypolite Petovan @silverwizard Those big bright child-proof cases are fantastic. Although according to my 7 year old the primary difference between our tablet and his friend's is that ours is red and his friend's is green, and not that ours is Android and his friend's is an iPad.
Those are the most important and salient differences! Software is dumb anyway!