Elw

@Elw@lemmy.sdf.org
3 Post – 83 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

I’m legitimately curious how many people have actually read their document. I just started the other day and I’m about 100 pages in. I’m glad to see people are starting to realize the amount of coordination going on within the far right. Straight up playbook for stacking the cards and consolidating power to the executive branch. Borderline unconstitutional type stuff.

20 more...

His utter lack of understanding about how SAaS companies work is astounding. Having worked on the backend of several, they’re all hot garbage and brittle. That’s why there were so many “useless” engineers. You know, the ones he shit canned when he acquired the company? Surprise, they were probably the only reason the dumpster fire wasn’t burning down the whole city block. The thing Elon fails to understand is that someone didn’t just write Twitter on one go and gift it on to the world. It has evolved over many many years. Technology stacks change, frameworks change, standards change and these companies are trying to continually add features to applications and don’t have the luxury of just rewriting the whole stack every time something new comes out. The end result is something that is often more akin to a living organism than a website or application. He probably thinks Twitter is some program running on every server that can just be rewritten and replaced. I can’t wait for the day they try to replace it and it ends up setting Twitter back a decade.

2 more...

It's not necessarily idiocy. Dystopian, yes. And when you consider that the case for it not being idiocy is a government that has created such wealth inequality that people will do this for an extra $50.

2 more...

Get a couple of buckets of water and place them around your yard. Drop a “Misquote Dunks” tablet in each bucket. Follow the package instructions for refreshing the dunks every so often.

Mosquito dunks work by “poisoning” what looks to the mosquito like an ideal spot to lay eggs; a pale of still water. But the mosquito dunk bacteria kills the mosquito larvae before they hatch.

It’s a more “long term” solution as it doesn’t actively take care of the current mosquito population but it prevents them from breeding.

There is also a type of fish called the misquitofish that you can put in a small pond, such as a wash basin or feeding trough. They feed on the mosquito larvae and are fairly self sufficient. I know people who use them to control mosquito populations in their gardens and they rarely have to do any kind of maintenance.

1 more...

Boundaries. Establish them and defend them with every ounce of your being. If you don't, most employers will grind you in to the dirt and send you out to pasture when you eventually crack under the pressure. Better to establish healthy boundaries up front. Not only will you find yourself more frequently surrounded by people you like and share mutual respect with, you will be happier and land fewer "shit" jobs because employers looking for people to send to the meat grinder will see that they can't grind you down and you'll be filtered from the hiring pool before you ever have to suffer at their hands.

100%. The rebranding of some HR departments as "People Officers" or "People Team" drives me bonkers. When push comes to shove, they will always protect the interests of the business before the interests of the employee. Full stop.

5 more...

I’ll answer with a simple test. Do the following first on your phone and then on a piece of paper:

Design a thing, something physical; a box, a house, a chair, whatever. In addition to the diagram, this note must include a description of the item, the bill of materials, the dimensions and, if applicable, assembly instructions that you could confidently hand to someone else and have them follow. Ideally, you should include the dimensions of the object directly on the sketch itself.

Now give this to someone and see how accurately they can reproduce the item while you go off and make a phone call.

There's a difference between complaining and providing constructive feedback. This post falls in the former category. If you are a user of a free product and you don't like how it works, you are entitled to a full, no questions asked, refund. You're welcome to make suggestions but devs who work hard to provide something at no cost and on their own time owe nobody anything. I've seen this play out year after year in the open source community and it's led to a lot of very good projects shutting down when the developer gets fed up with the demands and behavior of the community of users.

Wow I never connected this with anxiety/depression but that makes a lot of sense now that I hear it.

I didn’t go to the dentist and didn’t brush my teeth but for maybe the occasional time or for a spurt of a week or two here and there for about the last 15 years, starting in college. I always thought I was special because my teeth didn’t seem to know the difference and my mouth “felt” better. It wasn’t until about a year ago when I had a moler snap in half while eating dinner that I realized I might have an issue. I went to the dentist to have that replaced and was told I needed to make a change or this would keep happening.

I’ve now managed to get myself back on the habit of brushing at least once a day, usually before bed. My mouth hated it at first but after the first month or so it was so much better. I can’t believe I let myself go like I did…

Yes, build a quantum computer, a thing that no other nation has openly been credited with producing in any practical terms, and hold it up for the camera and provide high resolution photographs of the board…

The Iranian military is a joke. Any military that has to resort to pomp and buzz words to look impressive is by definition a failure.

Part of me wants to believe that this won’t be abused and it’ll actually make the web better. The other part of me knows better.

They could, theoretically, implement this on a way that just changes the pay structure for ad impressions but I think that all that will do is incentivize website owners using Google ads to block or nag “non-compliant” users… but here’s hoping they don’t abuse it I guess because there’s basically nothing we can do to change it once it’s out there. Genies out and all that

8 more...

Oh no… they’re making Linux history videos about things I was alive for… this must be what old feels like

Exactly this. SO is now just a repository of answers that ChatGPT and it’s ilk can train against. A high percentage is questions that SO users need answers to are already asked and answered. New and novel problems arise so infrequently thanks to the way modern tech companies are structured that an AI that can read and train on the existing answers and update itself periodically is all most people need anymore… (I realize that was rambling, I hope it made sense)

4 more...

I don't think anyone's arguing that Red Hat isn't in the right, legally, to do what they did (anymore). At this point, I think Redhat users are just tired of being jerked around. We're not children, most of us in the industry have been around a while and have seen this same story play out over and over again. We can see the writing on the wall and they've destroyed the trust of their community so, a long winded blog post defending their decision, arguing that they are within their rights to do it is largely irrelevant at this point. They've lost the narrative and the industry (us) will respond by gradually finding ways either away from or around Red Hat and associated projects. Soon, the only people left using it will be the same people who use other irrelevant and dated software, government.

3 more...

I’m glad to hear that they are planning to put more effort in to their documentation. The Arch Linux wiki is highly technically detailed, which is great, but can often be very intimidating to new users. I hope Canonical focuses on filling this documentation gap to better serve the new user to Linux.

4 more...

This is what I don’t get. What’s the end game here? Why are people so hell bent on Trump winning? Do these politicians not see the ship sinking? What possible motivation could be keeping these people loyal to him? I’m not talking about the regular constituents but the other republican officials in office? What the hell do they stand to gain here?

7 more...

As a newly minted parent, the "unborn child" was a real gut punch. I'm not the type to get overly emotional about celebrity deaths but when I read that, I felt it.

I had the pleasure of meeting Kevin twice. Once in 2008 at the H.O.P.E conference and again in 2017 when he and his company were contracted to do physical pen testing at our office. He was always very charismatic and kind in person. I'm sure he'll be missed.

Damn! I know she was going through some rough stuff in her personal life recently. I fear it’s all connected, though I sincerely hope I’m wrong.

I met Kris a couple of years ago at GopherCon. At the time I was very new to Go and she mentored me early on and was very friendly. She and I worked together during the GopherCon hackathon and produced the early version of a tool that ultimately became Kubicorn.

EDIT: seems like this was a climbing accident. Truly sad to hear. But going out doing what you enjoy… could be worse I suppose.

3 more...

Yeah, neither is great. Needs to be called something like "Employee Business Relations" maybe?

2 more...

This is great news! I have always wanted to try Dwarf Fortress but I know myself and I know from past experiences playing ASCII MUDs and rogue-likes that I don't play them enough to memorize what the different symbols represent and that inevitably causes me to drop the game entirely out of frustration. It seems like a small thing, but having the graphical version of the game on Linux is a huge win to me.

2 more...

Glad my new house has an induction range. I love cooking with gas stoves, and have done so for most of my life, but these studies about the emission of benzene and other pollutants from natural gas has had me rethinking this. Until recently I was using a gas range without any active ventilation, at best I opened the kitchen window and used a fan to try and exhaust heat and smoke from cooking when necessary. Now, having used induction for a while, I can say that I barely miss my old gas stove. I just hope, like smoking, any damage I’ve incurred will repair itself with time.

It does if you write a sufficiently large program and you don’t split it in to multiple packages… ask me how I know 🫠

The majority of the content I consume comes from YouTube these days. Here are a couple of my favorite channels:

  • Usagi Electric - old computers and vacuum tubes
  • Diesel Creek - big equipment restoration and salvage
  • Robot Cantina - silly car projects
  • Look Mum, No Computer - analog synth madness
  • RCTestFlight - RC cars, drones, etc.
  • Project Air - experimental RC stuff
  • BPS.Space - Amateur Rocketry
  • Tasting History - Food history
  • Tokyo Lens - exploring and discovery in Tokyo
  • Integza - mad science stuff
  • Jeff Geerling - Raspberry Pis etc.
  • Nile Red - backyard chemistry
  • Studson Studio - making models from garbage
  • Mr. Chickadee - super chill, traditional woodworking

I have away more niche channels too for bicycles, retro computing and model building. Just too many to list here unless someone’s interested. I can make a list for a particular niche.

Honestly… I don’t get this. It’s a bit more work than other distros but I think that Linux users often get to a point in their Linux journey where customizing a system with defaults is more difficult than just starting from a blank slate.

4 more...

Is it just me, or does this account really seem like a bot account based on post history?

This is something I struggle with too. On the one hand, I don’t want to say all instances are bad but there exists, definitely in Asian countries, sex work that caters specifically to ethnically based fetishes. On the one hand, fine, whatever gets your jimmy’s off as long as it’s consensual but I also think that these are often going to result in more exploitative environments when they occur in lower income areas.

100%. I’ve been running my own mail server for 10-15 years now and you’re spot on. I’ve wanted to migrate it to a more modern platform but I’m loath to relive the process of configuring postfix and dovecot. DKIM/SPF and Let’s Encrypt certs for IMAPS were also a bit of a headache to get sorted, and warming up the sending IP so gmail would stop sending me to spam… but once that’s all sorted it’s been very very hands off. I log in once in a blue moon to update it but otherwise it just sits and does it’s thing.

3 more...

Are we just going to pretend Debian doesn’t exist?

And before that, sites got slash dotted

This is neat and the best part is that it’s open. This means if you don’t like the batteries sticking out like that, it’s you are empowered to fix it and make it better!

I'd be genuinely shocked if there was no overlap between Fediverse users and TCM...

The sad truth is that non-techy types will never want to host something themselves unless there’s a reason why doing so is better. I’m not just talking about better the way you and I think of better, either. Nobody really cares about privacy or security or ownership of data. A lot of people like to say those things matter but until it’s as easy to host your own email as signing up for gmail, and doing so provides all the fringe benefits you get with Google, you’re not going to get completely non-technical people self hosting.

You’re right, though. As part of this, there needs to be a way to have an all-in-one package that defaults to enabling the things you’re talking about. There are a lot of plug-n-play methods of self hosting any number of things, but the hard part of hosting is doing it right and securely.

3 more...

There should be no dotfiles outside of home directories so I assume you mean a config file. In those cases, git and symlinks are a great option. Make a config directory in your home dir and organize it however you want. Include config files for the tools you’re interested in, commit them to git for backups and then symlink/hardlink the file to the expected path for the application.

Bro, squash merge

1 more...

Slackware 10.1 was my first time taking Linux out on the town. Had IBM Thinkpad T23. Thought I was pretty hot stuff. I still have massive respect for the project. They’re one of, if maybe the only, Linux distro out there that comes close to the quality of documentation as FreeBSD and because of that they’re the only distro that still feels like I think Unix felt like, or should feel like… idk maybe that’s nostalgia speaking…

Ok hold up… so, Red Hat is locking sources behind a subscription? Is this not a GPL violation?

2 more...

And like some other commenters have said: Lemmy is still very new and no standards and a lot of UX features still need to emerge. I am of the opinion that this fragmentation is a symptom of a UX problem and not inherent to anything specific to Lemmy.

Search needs to be improved to show communities from yet-to-be-discovered instances and provide a way for the user to view them by subscriber, popularity or newest, for example. But right now, it relies on the user to initiate a subscription to a community in another server for server discovery.

I could see a list of “popular instances” emerging at some point as a means for instance maintainers to prepopulate this in the future.m and Lemmy to support importing such a list to seed federation on new instances.

I run Ubuntu on a 2011 MacBook Air. I have to believe a 2012 Pro would also run it without issue

Let’s all do this with our mortgage payments

8 more...

Red House by Sarah Messer

In her critically acclaimed, ingenious memoir, Sarah Messer explores America’s fascination with history, family, and Great Houses. Her Massachusetts childhood home had sheltered the Hatch family for 325 years when her parents bought it in 1965. The will of the house’s original owner, Walter Hatch—which stipulated Red House was to be passed down, “never to be sold or mortgaged from my children and grandchildren forever”—still hung in the living room. In Red House, Messer explores the strange and enriching consequences of growing up with another family’s birthright. Answering the riddle of when shelter becomes first a home and then an identity, Messer has created a classic exploration of heritage, community, and the role architecture plays in our national identity.

I recently found this book at a book store in Vermont while on a road trip and I've absolutely fallen in love with it.