I’ve argued this for point for so many years and have become exhausted to the point where I don’t even bother any more.

Free software advocates, God bless them, are fighting a good fight but we will never see the average computer user giving up functionality for the sake of some computing ideology; whether that ideology be free software, privacy or security focused. I’m glad some people are willing to do so as I believe strongly that the world would not be where it is today if it weren’t for it’s existence offer the last two or three decades. But the reality is that 90% of the world views computers, phones and tablets as tools; a means to achieving an end, not the end in and of itself. There may be some subset of people who are willing to give up some convenience or utility if they believe strongly enough in one of these ideologies, but most of them will never care about the license of their software as long as it gets the job done. But this is precisely why we need people who do care about these ideologies because software freedom ultimately is important and people do benefit from it. It just needs to be as good as, if not better than, it’s non-free counterparts

This sounds really similar to how I do things but I use Ansible. What are the advantages to something like yadm, that is specifically designed for dot file management, and a generic config management utility like Ansible?

I’d be genuinely shocked if there was no overlap between Fediverse users and TCM…

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.

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

Don’t get back together with her and don’t fucking stay with her into college. She’ll just break up with you, again, at Disney… again.

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.

If I know the kids and they know me well enough that they call me “uncle”, then yes.

I’m glad to see that. I didn’t follow her on Twitch, but watching that was nice to see.

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.

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.

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.

Exactly right. Facebook will factor this in as am expected cost of doing business (if they didn’t already) and their stock will go up. This isn’t a penalty, this is just like paying a bribe. In the end, both are just lining the pockets of officials more interested in appearing to do something for the next news cycle so they can get re-elected.

Yes! I saw his channel mentioned by others so I chose to leave it off my list but that channel is a true gem!

Project Farm is neat but I find his videos a bit repetitive. Great resource for finding comparisons of specific things, though.

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.

But if you don’t consent, do they still let you use their services? I’m going to bet that, at best, it’ll be designed to make users think they must consent to use the service.

I love how there’s a whole generation of people who think that we went straight from email to to Slack and Discord. There was a whole, vibrant, ecosystem of XMPP and IRC services before these walled gardens showed up and supplanted open protocols in order to data mine their users.

I’m preaching to the choir in here, obviously, but we’ve been preaching this gospel for years and nobody cared. Not looking so crazy now. Unfortunately, the damage is done. Privacy has lost.

And before that, sites got slash dotted