I have no idea what I'm doing.

@fade Not sure how much longer that's going to be an issue, at this rate...

@sarahtaber I see your first post in my timeline, but had to click on it to see the rest. Then again, I have no idea if I'm using this site properly yet. Maybe there's a config option...?

@fade @sarahtaber Maybe it's because I subscribed after the thread was written? No idea...

@fade @sarahtaber Huh, the codebase is mostly written in Ruby. https://www.openhub.net/p/mastodon-social

@cstross I lost the @landley account on twitter years ago for tweeting "guillotine the billionaires" too many times. (12 hour suspension but they wouldn't let me resume using it without providing a phone number so SMS hijacking could steal the account as a single point of password reset failure visible within my whole zip code.) Fade set me up a read-mostly account (same handle spelled backwards) when scrolling down one screen in timelines without logging in turned into a paywall pop-up.

@cstross @graydon Gastrointestinal distress was my main omicron symtom last year, and my brain interpreted the stomach butterflies as anxiety. I'd never had anxiety before! Not the kind where my brain keeps trying to figure out what I'm anxious ABOUT, and latches on to something different every few hours for SIX MONTHS. (That really, really, really sucked. Brain fog's annoying but I'd had that before from other things.)

@cstross Open source sucks at aesthetic issues. Sadly, it's a structural issue in the development model: https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#13-08-2010

@ksonney The domain expert here would be @randileeharper@twitter.com but I dunno if she's translated any of her work to mastodon yet?

@sarahtaber Still a big step up from twitter. where I know what's happening and would like it to stop.

@sarahtaber Most culinary traditions started with "we need to eat an alligator" or "keep dead fish edible for 9 months" or "how can we disguise the same staple crop to eat it yet again". Some overcome this, some are an acquired taste. The cheeseburger/candy bar/modern sushi depend on railroads and refrigeration. Using ingredients and techniques from multiple continents, often discarding the constraints in their heritage (sausage is now fresh beef, the rice and fish combo is no longer fermented).

This article mentions nibel trying to turn his twitter into a day job. A hobbyist who wants to do their hobby full time is what universal basic income would enable, without the need to "monetize your passion". https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/10/31/nibel-twitter-elon-musk/

I'm trying to do https://landley.net/toybox releases quarterly, which is every 3 months. 3 months from the previous release would be November 12th: one week from today.

@Sisuile @fade I'm using the official-ish Mastodon-for-android app from the app store and it seems to be working? (I just searched for Mastodon it was the first hit.)

@fade @sarahtaber I'm waiting for people I follow to mention other people I should follow. Which is pretty much how it's always worked for me.

I wonder how the platform does handle quote retweets? https://mastodon.online/@fade/109289113435239044

Amazon needs a sherman antitrust breakup like yesterday. https://elliottkay.tumblr.com/post/696164756228358144

@fade Yes, but it showed up in a lump.

In the game "Project Zomboid", the power and water and television broadcasts keep working for a couple weeks into the zombie apocalypse, and it's just random when they cut out. Using twitter today feels a lot like that. https://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/discussions/0/357286663669992278/

Mastodon works like email. You follow @user@server but otherwise it's 90% twitter and 10% tumblr. You don't need an account on another server unless something happens to the first. You can set up your own server but most people use free gmail/hotmail-alikes.

@tatsunode On the web go to settings->preferences->appearance->enable advanced web interface.

The app is convinced I've accidentally boosted my own post twice (the zomboid one, second trying to UNDO it), but the web page doesn't see that. Oh well, bit of a learning curve involving what Aasif Mandvi called "the flying shards of a better tomorrow" is to be expected.

Watching various people from at the posting delay mastodon.online especially seems to be having. That server is just WHELMED right now. The timelines of @pkrugman and fade@mastodon.online are both "is this thing on?" all day. (Yes, it just takes a while to show up because overload.)

Sigh. Frown. Luckily this site still doesn't have a "gaslight" button to change a post after it's gone out. (Just like email doesn't, SMS texting didn't...)

@cstross I'd say "hit him in the ego" but dude bought a company that MAKES expensive red sports cars for his quarter century crisis. His ego's so big and fragile I'm not sure what counts as a vulnerable spot?

The lure of Mastodon is that Wikipedia's still around. The problem with Twitter is capitalism was not kind to the users of Vine, Flickr, Google Plus, Livejournal, Blogger, City of Heroes, AOL Instant Messenger, Myspace, Slashdot, Geocities, Compuserve...

@tomtomorrow It works like email. Once you've got an account on a server, you can read and write from there to anyone else, but name@hotmail is not the same as name@gmail.

@pkrugman Not "servers", the server. Mastodon works like email: @user@server. You can join a gmail or hotmail equivalent, or pick a smaller server, or set up your own.

You joined a popular server as as its userbase doubled in a week. Nobody here's sprung for banks of rackmounted servers for a single address (yet), mostly each address has its own machine (or cloud VM).

@fade You can still drop a link into your post. Even twitter took like 5 years to start expanding those inline. I expect the mastodon devs to add an update before too much longer.

@fade Ooh, cool. I joined one that's run by... a japanese journalist, I think?

Thought I'd hit the first technical weirdness following somebody on mastodon (503 address could not be fetched?) but Cory Doctorow's account here is pluralistic at mamot.fr not marmot.

Incomprehensible error messages! Yup, that's an open source user interface: https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#13-08-2010

Also, inability of the search bar to parse the URL form of addresses so we have to reverse http://site/@user by hand into @user@site is probably the most common complaint from people starting here. "I have their page up! How do I follow them?"

The Boomers have a lot to answer for. They broke the world and we can't unbeak it until they're gone. https://twitter.com/JoshuaPHilll/status/1589724965158662144

Latchkey kids raised themselves, but today despite carry a tracking device 24/7 if they're found walking on their own 2 blocks from home their parents face legal action. Modern american children are basically under house arrest until emancipation becausse Boomers are afraid.

Following both @sarahtaber and @cstross causes a little cognitive dissonance. In the absence of fossil fuels, grazing for meat is way more sustainable than monoculture corn. Sure it emits methane (half life of 7 years in the atmosphere) unless you feed your cows those seaweed supplements, but grazing improves the soil (without chemical fertilizer) and requires 1% as much water (in a trough vs acre-inches on the ground). http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/10/strong-and-stable.html#comment-2159828

The Chick-Fil-A effect: even if you like the product, the company is too evil to give money to. Tesla, Solar City, and Starlink all fund fascism now. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/tesla-stock-elon-musk-sell-shares-twitter-losses-advertiser-exodus-2022-11

I'm taking "twitter goes down so the leveraged buyout loans get called in" as a given. I'm wondering when "You have a nazi powerwall in your house? Ew." kicks in. Remember: Paypal kicked this guy out but kept Thiel.

@fade There's a github thread on this if you wanted to opine at the developers. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12753

It's a pity the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund imploded when its executive directory got metooed. (He deserved it, but the splash damage took down a useful organization.) https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/109302124170270595

Context for that: https://www.tcj.com/no-oversight-leads-to-a-history-of-sexual-misconduct-and-bullying-at-the-cbldf/

Talking too much about twitter here seems a bit like droning on about your ex, but this is a good article bout the layers of nested stupid in play in dujourpocalypse. https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/musk-advertising-twitter-boycott.html

Gas station donuts costing a $1.30 now helps a lot with the not buying one part.

Manly beardy men keep forgetting that women are half the population and when they stop playing along everything STOPs. Iran is relearning this right now. https://warontherocks.com/2022/11/why-dictators-are-afraid-of-girls-rethinking-gender-and-national-security/

Behind every successful man is a woman who at the very least provides him unpoisoned food and has custody of the household's knives while he sleeps. 80% of the society he maintains is dedicated to preventing her from realizing that.

I'm rooting for Ukraine and Mastodon for similar reasons. Some asshole marches in and goes "you people all belong to me now" and starts getting his ass handed to him.

@sarahtaber What plumbing are you using to cross-post these? (Or does your server just recognize links to the tweetocracy?)

@cstross Blogs and email. Some random dude out there impersonating. You've got a longstanding website that can point to your official whatsits.

@stephenfry If you're using the web interface, click the preferences gear and appearance->"enable advanced web interface" to get column view (ala tweetdeck).

Only your server knows who you are: when looking at someone else's web page you're not logged in there. Flip "https://server/@user" around to @user@server and type it into the search bar, that pulls it up in a column on YOUR server so you can interact (reply, favorite, retoot) without a login pop-up.

@Ciaraioch The process is "export, import, announce". They did a blog about it: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-to-another/

@rwalker1501 @pluralistic I wrote Android's command line utilities and I've literally been trying to address this (and poke them about it) for years: http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2020-July/011898.html

@rwalker1501 @pluralistic ON the hardware side, Jeff Dionne (long-ago founder of uclinux) has been working on this, https://j-core.org isn't up to date but gives the basics.

Huh. @sarahtaber uses the "only the first tweet of a thread shows up in your feed, you must click the link there to see the rest" and I worry I'll miss her (rare) threads. @pluralistic expands every post inline for his daily screen and what I really want there is a link to his blog. I wonder if there's some way to control this per-user at my end?

@fade Hover text: "A small dog with big ears stretching" and "A small dog with big ears looking aside".

I am so tired of watching octegarians argue with septuagenarians over who should run the country.

@fade Meh, I assume it'll all sort itself out in a few months.

@Ciaraioch Being on the receiving end of a refugee wave is seldom fun, but a few years later they form the backbone of your society.

@sarahtaber Can be sung to the "cindarelly" song the talking rats were singing in the Disney Cinderella movie.

@fade My reply wound up under your same "the cw" tag as your post.

Remembered why I didn't follow Cory Doctorow on Twitter, and unfollowed him here. Good material, but way too high volume for the medium. I am not up for a 50 tweet screed expanded inline every day, I fall behind way fast, miss what everyone else has to say, and then reading becomes a chore. I want the link to the blog with topic summary version.

@fade Yes but A) we're married, B) you don't to it every single day.

@fade The software is still under active development...

Tool for finding mastodon accounts for a given twitter follower list. (Requires authorizing it to see your twitter follower list, remember to undo that afterwards.) https://fedifinder.glitch.me/

Ooh, the "glass floor" is a wonderful metaphor. https://www.huffpost.com/archive/in/entry/the-glass-floor-is-keeping-americas-richest-idiots-at-the-top_in_5da3e9d6e4b02c9da04cc610

@fade and I watched a Spy vs Family episode and I want big circular ice balls like that for my Diet Dr. pepper. I've got the glass for it right here, but it's got automatic ice in it.

@ursulav Welcome!

@CliftonR @ursulav I never followed popehat or stephen fry on twitter and just followed then both here. Pretty sure we're all winging it.

@ClipMeri @ursulav There's a website that'll do it for you (https://fedifinder.glitch.me/) but I haven't used it. Easing in, as it were.

I already unfollowed cory doctorow again because his daily threads were just too high volume for my comfort with the interface here.

@sarahtaber I have yet to see a project run by humans that didn't have horrible aspects. Wikipedia, Linux, Worldcon... Pushing back is hard work. Writing it off as impure thus anathema is easy.

@sarahtaber Having read her thread, and her follow-up comments, she insists it's not any server(s) policies but "a culture problem" with "mastodon people".

The userbase literally doubled last week, and the influx is accelerating. The "culture" is kinda in flux. There may be some clenching from the locals, but how is "the problem is those people over there are bad people" a useful argument during a refugee crisis fundamentally reshaping demographics?

@cavyherd @CliftonR @ursulav stephenfry.com links to his mastodon at the bottom and popehat has his in his twitter bio.

There have been two iconic batmen. The Bright Knight (batman as paladin) was Adam West. The Dark Knight (batman as Batman) was Kevin Conroy. #RIP

@sarahtaber I wonder if threadreader threads will outlive twitter? (It's about like asking if a site gets taken over will the new one put up a robots.txt that tells archive.org to hide the history from before it changed hands...)

Failed my politeness roll (https://github.com/landley/toybox/issues/397#issuecomment-1311981105) but if I remove the nav bar how do you get to the other pages? Nav bar across top means laptop users have a screen of boilerplate to scroll through on every page before any page content (or navigate pulldowns, introducing javascript and also hard on a small screen)...

Day 3 of Moderna booster + 4th (hopefully final) rabies shot are combining into a neck/shoulder ache that goes from my sinuses to my ribcage. On my RIGHT side. (Got stabbed in the left arm both times this week. No idea why, but in case the twitpocalypse wasn't making it hard enough to concentrate...)

@fade Let them. I can set up my own server if necessary.

@rgegriff https://landley.net/toybox/about.html is trying to do something similar.

@paco in theory a raw feed of Twitter has been going to the library of Congress for some years. https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the-library-of-congress-2/

@fade You have four profile links, one can be to IF, one to Spanc...

Boston Dynamics is up there with Cambridge Analytica and Palantir in the "oh hell no" range. No, you are not normalizing robotic police dogs wandering campus. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/robots-will-roam-a-university-to-study-a-a-socio-technical-problem/

@Dubikan@tooot.im Because police and military are already that company's largest customers for that product? It's not designed for delivery it's designed for crowd control. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-nypds-robot-dog-was-a-really-bad-idea-heres-what-went-wrong/

@Dubikan@tooot.im back on Twitter @cstross and @sarahtaber had multiple long threads on Boston Dynamics' crowd control robots. https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/7/22371590/boston-dynamics-spot-robot-military-exercises-french-army

@Dubikan@tooot.im I'm not trying to pull up the investor presentations on my phone. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robot-dogs-to-patrol-southern-border-ghost-robotics/

@Dubikan@tooot.im @cstross @sarahtaber Because they're trying to widely deploy them first. This whole wandering around campus thing is explicitly an attempt to normalize them. https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22726111/robot-dogs-with-guns-sword-international-ghost-robotics

I have now blocked my first walrus on Mastodon.

Ah, it's Sea Lion. I was close. http://wondermark.com/1k62/

I have reached the "toggle always show images marked sensitive" portion of my mastodon experience, because otherwise I had to click on every image to actually load it. (If everything is sensitive nothing is.)

I'm seriously triggered by hypodermic needles due to childhood trauma. I used to be able to make my gums bleed by thinking too hard about them. I see pictures of them in news articles and on TV and such all the time and do not enjoy it. But I don't expect the world to censor itself for me, and anti-vaccine people who would like to eliminate such things are the bad guys.

Turns out reality is grey and complicated and full of sharp bits. "This is the answer" is never the whole answer.

@mekkaokereke If it's where the people are, sure. It's just another method for people to talk to each other and self-organize. Before twitter it was livejournal. Ukraine's doing it through Telegram of all things. When Freenode got a hostile takeover last year libra.chat replaced it in under a month.

This one combines failure modes of email (51 years old), wikipedia (21), and Worldcon (83). Refugees come here for the same reason techies fled to Linux: capitalism destroys all it touches.

@mekkaokereke Nothing's a perfect defense from capitalism, it's always trying to corner every market. Google's Android maintains detente with Linux and 1/3 of all email is gmail, but so far they're VERY careful not to squeeze to hard. Microsoft bought github.

All federated protocols suffer "embrace and extend" attacks from capitalist shepherds trying to fence in and milk a flock. This one is more "new" than "inherently resistant". We all know what's coming, but reset to fresh context buys time.

@howardtayler Eh, my email has been rob at landley dot net for years and nobody's made a big deal about it yet.

The endgame is de-gerrymandering the south. Ann Richards was still Governor of Texas in 1996. Barbara Jordan made the opening statement at Nixon's impeachment. Texas isn't red, it's blue and occupied. Why would any other southern state be different? https://mstdn.social/@emilylhauser/109334277735014689

@fade The official app is craptacular because I told my account to open all content warnings automatically, and the app ignored it. There's a little eyeball in the corner that's supposed to open the whole thread, the app ignores it you have to tap each individual message to see it. And the content warninged messages don't expand, they're full size of the invisible text, just with almost no text in them until you performatively tap. And I can't remove the CW from this reply.

@fade And having revealed the messages while viewing the thread, they're still hidden back in the main feed. Plus who exactly is triggered by "meta"? Why is there a content warning on it?

I am in this reply and don't like it. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/11/mastodon-and-federation/#comment-237870

The blog post the comments are on is quite good too.

The Russian word "vranyo" seems to be exactly what David Graeber was talking about in his book BS Jobs. https://youtu.be/Fz59GWeTIik

Sigh. Why did the library of congress stop collecting full twitter data in 2017? Why does mastodon still refuse to implement proper quote tweets? https://newsie.social/@rvawonk/109340710010154210

Hmmm, on the one hand I want to read threads in the 4th column of mastodon's "advanced web interface" (ala tweetdeck) so I can favorite things like https://mastodon.online/@sarahtaber/109342811491016990 but on the other I have 4 fixed columns with no scrolling and "right click the timestamp -> open in new tab" has unlimited tabs to read later...

I remember when twitpic was an external site, one which eventually went down. We're recapitulating phylogeny like mad over here. https://toad.social/@davetroy/109337529381432993

And yes, linking to tweets was a thing long before they expanded inline so you didn't have to click through. Right now mastodon has "posts that aren't replies", "everything", but nothing between. Replies-to-self are hidden just like replies to others, so if I add to a thread it's easily missed. Once again open source UI guys are SCRUPULOUSLY avoiding learning anything from the experience of other projects.

Take this thread: the second post was over half an hour after the first, and there were a couple posts on other topics in between. The first tweet wasn't a thread when I started, and unless you scroll back you won't see it. But "posts and replies" includes replies mid-thread to other people with zero context. Replies-to-self and replies-to-others are categorically different things, a distinction Mastodon ignores.

@fade @BunRab If I could find a bagged cheese called Bland Protein Moment, I would get it for you.

Nobody who's afraid to look stupid is actually smart, because correcting ignorance/mistakes is the source of learning. https://mastodon.online/@sarahtaber/109344167912235621

If you have 1 million dollars you can spend $20k/year for 50 years without earning a penny of interest. That's the take-home pay from a full time job earning $10.75/hr. US federal minimum wage is still $7.25/hr.

Iran's ruling theocracy just announced its decision to execute fifteen thousand protestors. Meanwhile, they're Russia's biggest arms dealer in Ukraine. https://www.newsweek.com/iran-votes-execute-protesters-says-rebels-need-hard-lesson-1757931

When open source development works well this is why: integrating feedback from users as part of the design process. https://mastodon.online/@fade/109348335806292088

@kerileighmerritt Mastodon has a dozen different phone apps. The official one is the worst of them all.

Why is a barf bag prominently displaying a patent number in 2022? The movie "airplane" had a barf bag in it 42 years ago (the jive bros used one) and they weren't new then. #becausecapitalism

Libertarians are to liberty as scientologists are to science.

King Henry II of France's intellectual property law needs to go away with Billionaires and Boomers. Attribution is not ownership and the USA has been able to afford universal basic income for at least 50 years. https://youtu.be/MAFUdIZnI5o

@ArkadyMartine The main downside of induction is it's incompatible with woks. I need the electric kettle version of a wok.

Content warnings are me trying to guess what other people might be offended by. (The answer is "literally everything". There are cheese phobias.) Filters are me setting "I dowanna see this" on my specific things. https://wandering.shop/@devinsinger/109354238077828563

@sarahtaber An abuser promising he'll change is not to be believed anyway. He's looking for an ablative blame shield for his continued micromanagement. He CAN'T stop.

I grew up on 8-bit computers (C64/128/Amiga) which gave me a spider sense about dying platforms and where to jump to that's served me well as DOS and Fidonet and Livejournal went under. The current was flowing strongly from Twitter to Mastodon since the day Musk carried his "I am going to sink twitter" prop into the lobby. @stephenfry switching over was confirmation. (Wikipedia and Linux and Worldcon still exist, largely outside of capitalism. That's the appeal of Mastodon: same kind of thing.)

@sarahtaber I'd estimate mastodon can completely replace twitter (working out new spam filtering, scalability, interpersonal social networks, cultural cachet so everybody links to toots instead of tweets) in 6 to 9 months. And then surpass it. (Given its decentralized nature, various national regulatory bodies are going to absolutely freak out.)

Quote tweeting will show up on individual instances. It's a thing you can trivially just DO, the question is what the interface of your particular instance displays. https://mstdn.social/@clive@saturation.social/109348460968672108

@aloria https://social.librem.one/@mcneely/109338225935485076

A society designed to actually take care of people can do so cheaply and efficiently. https://youtu.be/drGeDmBXNuU

@vagina_museum I'd be a little more worried that this is the second post from you where the image was missing in the phone app if I hadn't just opened the link in browser and had the page fail to load twice before finally working.

Translation: it's open source, the maintainer thinks he knows better than the entire user base unanimously telling him otherwise, so you have to fork the code to get this feature. https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99662106175542726

@Gargron so we have to run a fork is what you're saying.

@fade if the largest instance keeps threatening to block every other instance that steps slightly out of line, I suspect they're the one who will wind up unplugged from everyone else. But we'll see how it shakes out...

@fade You have kigurumi. That probably counts.

Wow. nitter.net has a MUCH better threading interface than stock mastodon. (The thread in question about running a Mastodon instance in the USA is informative too.) https://wandering.shop/@CliftonR/109368830530284582

I expect 99% of the reason he really did that is when you link to one of his posts he wants a big picture of his face to show up instead of what he said.

@aloria who knew such a small cat could draw so many webcomics.

@caztastrophe didn't Stephen Fry delete his twitter account last week?

@fade Let them? "If you don't change your behavior I will..." Good luck with that.

@sarahtaber The solution to Kings has always been the same. The Red Queen was projecting.

"An American Tail" is mostly remembered as a Don Bluth film, but it was the first animated film Steven Spielberg produced. Spielberg went on to be executive producer on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and eventually became the "S" in Dreamworks SKG.

Some people do great work as part of a group, get a big head, go solo, and create Rock-a-doodle, Thumbelina and a Troll in central park back to back.

@cstross No but I am following the mstdn.social one and you might want to swap the "(alternative)" title from the one you use more to the one you use less.

@KBSpangler You can sing "himbo, he's a himbo" to the flintstones song.

Attempting to clean the crud out of my keyboard has greatly increased the keybounce I'm experiencing. As was foretold in legend and song.

@fade "What are you doing?" "Mastodating."

I await the mastodon landscape stabilizing enough for people to produce decent server directories. I've found a nudist mastodon instance, one for graphic artists, several for furries, one entirely populated with journalists, one set up by fired twitter employees, and now https://handmade.social/@maker/109269198300726570 (click on server link, what's in YOUR "local timeline"...)

Listening to NHK News Des, and... did Zelensky always speak like Batman? Because that's some serious Batman going on there.

Oh hey, Japan just intercepted its first ICBM in flight. (Launched from a ship off Hawaii. The USA first did that in 1996, launched from Kwajalein which is why I heard about it.)

@determinerik The same way leaving Livejournal when Russia bought it and MySpace when Rupert Murdoch bought it were political statements?

Faceboot has been a cesspool for decades and has 6 times the userbase. If Cambridge Analytica wasn't a call to action, waiting out the Boomers seems like the most viable strategy. (Midpoint of Boom was 1955, post-covid USA average lifespan is 77, thus LD50 of Boomers is 1955+77=2032.)

I lost my twitter account in 2019 (https://landley.net/notes-2019.html#21-10-2019) for being publicly anti-billionaire, and stayed stealth-ish on my alt (original name spelled backwards, as I said: "ish"), and I'm totally out of practice linking to my own stuff from this sort of environment.

@davidgerard I go to individual interesting servers and look at their "explore" tabs. Both the locally generated content and what they're pulling in from federation can be interesting. Each server has a different one generated by its user base. https://archaeo.social/explore is a site of archaeologists, for example.

@vagina_museum And a song: http://www.queenofwands.net/d/20040121.html

Ow. https://dan.mastohon.com/@danhon/109385662885785283

@fade That book Elrond wrote?

I can't figure out a URL to see my favorites list. There's a pulldown menu when I view my own profile in column view, but no link when I got to my actual page.

As with all things mastodon, this issue was brought up years ago and the maintainer went "I personally dislike it therefore I won't allow anyone else to have it". https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/166

@sarahtaber Not leaving one privately owned service susceptible to capitalist buyout once the userbase is mature enough to harvest for another of the same, thanks. Good luck with it though.

@sarahtaber I'm sure their "loss leader" phase will be highly enjoyable, especially for the judasfluencers.

@digitalraven @cstross I had that problem once. Had to swap out the azumanga diodes.

Expecting software development from the Free Software Foundation is like expecting televangelists to feed the homeless.

@fade Romanes Eunt Domus.

@alexwild Raising the top tax rate back to 1963 levels is not at the edge of the Overton window, it's the middle. The edge is sharp, like a guillotine.

@jwz works fine here..

@cstross Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, bananaphone. Ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul, bananaphone. #YesIAmOld

Bought the 2023 "free frosty with purchase" keychain yesterday but it's still 2022, so I showed both keychains today... and the cashier gave me two frosties. Fairly certain that's not how it's supposed to work.

@BunRab Ooh, tip of the iceberg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_metre links to https://medium.com/illumination/the-cursed-emily-dickinson-and-pok%C3%A9mon-crossover-39cdc9bcb9c7 at the end.

@monad_cat Mastodon isn't special, the protocol is the important thing. https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/tumblr-to-add-support-for-activitypub-the-social-protocol-powering-mastodon-and-other-apps/

Sigh. Yeah, pretty much. https://universeodon.com/@Saadia___m/109383130630567327

@fade I know there are browser plug-in filters that can swap out specific words...

@nameshiv Why were your opinions about cricket difficult to separate from their loved ones' opinions about cricket?

I've never been an orthodox cricketeer. I followed the Fifth Doctor as a child, but have long since lapsed. FIFA has probably let out the white smoke a couple times since then, so I don't know current orthodoxy...

@sarahtaber I blogged about how both-sidesism makes you trivial to manipulate a full dozen years ago when it was Obama being played. http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#11-09-2010

@fade usually it's a profanity filter doing that? Scunthorpe in England has that all the time.

@fade merde is french?

@seananmcguire Welcome! (I'd mail you a mastodonwarming present, but you moved.)

@sarahtaber Can be sung to "wish you a merry christmas".

@cstross This is a guy who bought a company that makes shiny red sports cars for his quarter-life crisis.

I used to be annoyed at twitstrangler and such for stealing content and reposting it surrounded by ads, but now I _want_ to link to thread archives that should outlive the parent site: https://mastodon.online/@sarahtaber/109411399771719010

@BadgerGirl @cstross He's a middle-aged white male narcissist with a rich daddy who grew up under apartheid breathing leaded gas fumes. (South Africa didn't stop using leaded gas until 2005.)

@fade Nothing enrages a comfortably well off white male like something not being for/about them. They have to go all brony on it and claim the territory for Spain and push the original inhabitants onto reservations. That or flounce. They can't compete otherwise.

@sarahtaber https://youtu.be/LCDgJiPBxfI

@Ciaraioch https://youtu.be/9gW6yQZyx5w

@sarahtaber https://youtube.com/shorts/tp0FFY4oBsg?feature=share

@rrwo@fosstodon.org @cstross You know how pulsars spin faster as they collapse inwards? Grifters have a similar endgame where fewer and fewer followers are more and more fanatical. He's trading broad shallow appeal for a dedicated cult.

@notfunnyelle@mstdn.social All part of the process.

@april @ArkadyMartine This old anonymous posting "Institutional memory and reverse smuggling" was brilliant, and the fact it's only in archive.org now is officially ironic: https://web.archive.org/web/20120111055334/http://wrttn.in/04af1a

@lauren @cstross The government hates anonymity. The ongoing "war on cash" in the USA is kind of related: everything you've bought with a credit card records who money went from, who it went to, and when. It's supoenable when not freely shared. Five years ago you bought birth control and donated to a political party. Stores demanding "exact change only" or refusing to take cash, civil forfeiture, removal of ATMs... the ability to pay cash is going away and nobody's even particularly noticing.

@lauren @cstross It's come up there too https://www.kpcc.org/2018-04-04/why-more-and-more-la-businesses-are-refusing-your hence https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/california-bill-cash-payment-requirement-cashless-store-ban/ but it looks like the war on Cash is mostly a Republican initiative (they want to track and control everybody) and once Democrats got the house in D.C. they introduced https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4395/text which passed house but died in the Senate and then this year it got tacked to a defense spending bill https://payne.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-payne-jr-s-bill-protect-cash-passes-house-defense-spending-bill but it looks like Republicans in the Senate shot it down again https://www.atlantafed.org/blogs/take-on-payments/2022/10/24/payment-choice-act-and-what-it-means-for-cash

@lauren @cstross I live in Austin Texas. The governor is a foaming loon and the GOP tries out its crazy stupid here first.

Austin is so gerrymandered six congressional districts each have a slice of it, mine runs up the west side of I-35 for 200 miles into the suburbs of Dallas. When I enter my ZIP code into the "who is your congressbeing" web pages, they need the street address to answer the question.

The Fiesta mart near my house has had "exact change only" signs up for over a year.

@sarahtaber @fade The way greensleeves was jesusized as "what child is this"?

As Picasso said: good artists borrow, genteel white men steal and get called great for doing so. https://masto.ai/@vagina_museum/109421452672788920

@conradhackett The ciiiircle of riiiiiiiice.... (Music swells.)

Hitting the reblog button by accident can't easily be undone. Bit of a design flaw, not sure if that's in the app or the protocol or what...

@fade The official app is terrible.

@Ciaraioch https://wandering.shop/@seananmcguire https://mastodon.social/@OhNoSheTwitnt https://redwombat.social/@KBSpangler https://mastodon.social/@dianeduane https://redwombat.social/@ursulav https://mastodon.online/@sarahtaber

@lilithsaintcrow Artemis doesn't even come to the family gatherings anymore, she has her lesbian polycule in a cabin in the woods with more chest freezers full of deer meat than you can imagine, and takes potshots at anybody who gets too close.

GOP Boomers want to raise the voting and drinking ages because they don't consider anyone younger than them to be people. https://wandering.shop/@kagan/109422734878291417

Yes, I plan to continue link tweeting. We'll eventually move to a service that actually supports this, whatever the mastodon maintainer thinks about it. (If the import side doesn't fix it, the export side can make the "preview" be the whole post in a box.)

@lilithsaintcrow Waste not want not.

I always assume "peasy" is the peas porrige that's been in the pot for 9 days. It's like natto, except served with fresh squeezed lemon juice for some reason? https://mastodon.social/@jef/109424423447349468

@fade If people have been actively living there, the upper layers are probably noise until you get down a bit.

@fade https://youtu.be/QQzg1vpxnnY

Good thread. https://mastodon.world/@DavidOAtkins/109377276685403061

@jaskot @DavidOAtkins Except "centrists" have been the "good people on both sides" camp trivially gamed by manipulating the Overton Window.

I wrote about that right-wing strategy in 2010 (https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#04-07-2010 then https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#11-09-2010) and they've faithfully executed on it ever since.

This is why I don't give google maps location permission, I search a nearby intersection to get a starting location. https://infosec.exchange/@thezero/109403993020558254

@jaskot @DavidOAtkins That's not what centrist means anymore. The same way libertarian and neoliberal have nothing to do with liberty or liberalism.

@jwz At the start of November Mastodon had 665K active users, it's ending the month with 7 million, and you're surprised it's having scaling issues.

@carturo222 I still hold the demise of "Adult Wednesday Adams" against it. I'm aware that's not fair to the new girl, but everything Adams since has seemed like a cash grab. (Especially those two recent CGI movies.)

@digitalraven @Dingfelder @cstross @foone @funranium If we did have star trek replicators, they'd have to have a whole LOT of safety protocols in the pattern parser.

@fade Why not?

I wonder if I can set something up to post a link from Mastodon to my blog every time I update that? https://landley.net/notes.html it's just a text file I edit in vi with a python script to generate an RSS feed from the name= html tags. There's no way to comment there, and hasn't been since I left livejournal. "Comment on mastodon" would make sense if each entry linked to the Mastodon post linking back to it. Hmmm...

One slight awkwardness is I do tend to upload them in batches, but I try not to get more than a few days behind at a time these days. (Keep the open source development blog up to date was one of my patreon goals...)

@drewtoothpaste wouldn't that just be damnation army?

@fade brevity is the fillet of sole of wit.

Without the guillotines, monarchs respawn in the form of billionaires. Raising the top tax rate back to where it was in 1963 is NOT the left edge of the Overton window. https://mas.to/@VeryBadLlama/109439006906312107

In the absence of proper support for quote tweets, people are using screenshots. I intend to continue linking to the post, and Mastodon sucking stops mattering when we eventually all move to activitypub implementations other than Mastodon. https://wandering.shop/@susankayequinn/109439009515868706

Of course the main problem with this style of quote tweeting, other than losing proper attribution, is that servers tend to only retain attachments for a few months before purging them. So the nutso Mastodon maintainer is insisting that we lose history. https://mstdn.social/@AdamParkhomenko/109436668085166260

Not that archive.org seems prepared to archive Mastodon yet. Which is going to be a problem because each individual server goes down on its own timeline. It's like having a link to web pages on a site that may not be there in 3 years...

@jaskot @DavidOAtkins https://mastodon.online/@pkrugman/109439618522998970

@evacide Mastodon started November with 655k users and ended it with 7 million. There may be a pause to digest, but there's also been a lot of new instances starting and people moving from larger instances to smaller ones. Many of the larger instances have hit capacity constraints, Mastodon's Ruby codebase doesn't really scale all that well, and active pub is uncached. (Each server independently fetches the attached resources for each post and the bandwidth spike from that is nuts.)

@evacide Here's Jamie Zawinski complaining about the bandwidth spikes on his own instance. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/11/mastodon-stampede/

Sigh. Damp clothing dries much faster while you're wearing it, but there's a significant warmth investment required before you get a return.

@AMS @digitalraven @Dingfelder @cstross @foone @funranium The sundae is a binary explosive (needs oxygen) rather than self-actualizing, and the reaction is rate-limited by surface area (modulo liquid oxygen).

Of course in zero gravity and an oxygen atmosphere, flour and non-diary creamer are powerful explosives. Possibly why all the gravity plates have built-in batteries that last a very, very long time. (I always wanted an episode to tap those in a power failure...)

@jaskot @DavidOAtkins You're calling yourself a "centrist" when those are the "good people on both sides", "opinions on shape of the planet differ" people. It's like trying to salvage "libertarian". 70% support for abortion is majority and mainstream, but not "centrist".

Centrists try to put only _some_ kids in cages, restrict _some_ abortions, allow _some_ forms of voter suppression, etc.

@cstross @digitalraven @foone @funranium @Dingfelder @AMS Mamalian evolution has had way longer than battery technology to work out energy density, impact resistance, mostly avoiding spontaneous combustion...

@fade Podcast-style or convention-style?

Trusting Billionaire Jeff Bezos to permanently install an always-on microphone in your home was NEVER a good idea. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/

I wonder if the implosion of Amazon Alexa counts as a good example of that "trust thermocline"' thing? https://scribe.rip/the-trust-thermocline-explains-how-companies-suddenly-lose-customers-and-employees-2657c9535e6a

Alexa always struck me as basically spyware. Amazon's business model is selling customer data. (You're not the customer, you're the product.) Amazon's purchase of Roomba is about mapping the inside if your house. https://www.natlawreview.com/article/amazon-s-recent-acquisitions-highlight-value-consumer-data-and-evolving-privacy

I file this under "we still need link tweets". Possibly a new version with more features, but not having it at all is fork-worthy... https://infosec.exchange/@deweyritten/109422726098578343

@fade Good thing you got snow chains for your boots.

@fade I've done two of those, if you need help with it...

"Only observing humans under capitalism and concluding it's in our nature to be greedy is the equivalent of only observing us underwater and concluding it's in our nature to drown."

https://youtu.be/PaASqPnpq5Y

@Ciaraioch I'm good on dread and anxiety thanks. Stocked up in 2016.

@lowpassage @fade Oddly that post did NOT reach my feed via @ursulav

@cstross @sarahtaber Mugging is profitable. Preventing myself from being mugged is interference with someone else's business model, and someone somewhere has to have sued over it...

@infinite8horizon @cstross Capitalism is the dominant modern religion. It replaced Christianity in the US about the time televangelists and for-profit mega churches showed up. The primary remaining advantage of pretending to have a god over other profitable cult forms is the tax avoidance.

We can't get sane healthcare in the US until the Boomers die. https://youtu.be/dAMAZf6q8lI

@luvadeforno@mastodon.social @evacide It's not the implementation language, it's the design. https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/109423049041769090

@luvadeforno@mastodon.social @evacide Passing along attachments fetched from the original source while federating the post would require some sort of signing/checksumming infrastructure to trust them, which is either absent or insufficient (and potentially CPU-intensive to verify). But without that, the process is very inefficient (and unreliable) because it repeatedly recreates the summary/digest. It's the gnutella problem: emergent scalability issues because the designers didn't think ahead enough.

@cstross @eliza I was seven years old when I first read a story where orbital energy platforms beaming solar power down to the ground were hijacked and pointed at cities. It was not a new story when I read it.

So of course: https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1596505/musk-uk-power-station-space-energy-initiative-spacex

@BrynnTannehill74 @alanhunter He made his followers private. Right click open in new tab if you're unsure, that'll always go to THEIR site, but in this case the cannonical link is https://mstdn.social/@markhertling/following and the follower list is privated. (There are 58 entries it won't show.)

@BrynnTannehill74 Syndication isn't new, newspaper journalism was doing it a hundred years ago.

If an associated press article or "dear abby" is syndicated into your newspaper you can READ it locally. You can only publish a reply through YOUR newspaper (your own column, or letter to the editor). If you need more info than was published in the syndicated column, you may have to find the newspaper the author actually works at.

Now substitute "website" for "newspaper".

@BrynnTannehill74 You don't actually have to switch your subscription to track down and talk to the author of "dear abby", and then switch it AGAIN to reply to Siskel and Ebert.

@dotsonapage @fade TalkBack is a profound difference in how the phone works. It took me a couple of minutes to manage to switch it off again when I tried it. (I grabbed something called speechify out of the app store and cut and paste individual text blobs into it, but it's a terrible solution.)

@sarahtaber What billionaires are buying with all that money is control.

Late stage capitalism in a nutshell. https://mastodon.online/@sarahtaber/109452616245273119

@sarahtaber This is why moving back to distributed protocols makes sense. It has its own problems, but a lot more people are in a position to do something about them.

@cstross Giving the other side what they want up front is generosity. Giving in after a struggle is capitulation.

@sarahtaber And why running for the hills from the compromise to network to an uncompromised one makes exactly as much sense as fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Participation in a totalitarian state does not let you "fight back from within".

@sarahtaber Here's the guy who wrote the "I am part of the resistance inside the trump administration" op ed for the New York Times explaining how stupid and counterproductive his attempt to provide "adult supervision" was (around the 20 minute mark): https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5hY2FzdC5jb20vcHVibGljL3Nob3dzLzVmZjVmNTIwMzk0NThhNjk0Yjg3ZTUyMw/episode/MmIyZTMwYTAtNGM3Mi0xMWVkLTlhYjUtMzM0YTAwZjZiZDdk?ep=14

@neolithicsheep It's not a panacea but it means more people can act on the problems. Dictators are highly effective but tend to become the problem with time, until the guillotines come out. Distributed solutions (spam filtering, immune systems, democracy) require constant maintenance and result in stalemate wars of attrition, but are ultimately sustainable without tearing it down and starting over.

Not only is email still around, Gmail's market share declined from 1/3 to 1/4 over the pandemic.

Under US tax law, vehicles over 6,000 lb are deductible as a business expense. Smaller vehicles are not.

That's how stupid tax policy eliminated the small cheap cars people actually want to buy, and instead we have to be excited about the F-150 lightning.
https://www.taxplanning.com/single-post/vehicles-over-6-000-pounds

@ben The mastodon maintainer's personal hatred of quote tweets is like Linus Torvalds' hatred of kgdb, or source control. Linus eventually caved to his user base because he's a good enough maintainer not to let his project get forked.

The German guy is on a path to having the ecosystem fork out from under him:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/tumblr-to-add-support-for-activitypub-the-social-protocol-powering-mastodon-and-other-apps/

@Teri_Kanefield Yeah, @seananmcguire hit a similar issue. There's some sort of rate limiting if too many new follow requests come in at once, anti-dogpiling or something. Threshold configurable by the server admin. You can "accept all".

@dalias I should log back into the old account from 2019 and change the bio to point here. I've refused to give Twitter my phone number and still don't want to...

I am a child of the 8-bit systems. I can sense a technology with the smell of death upon it. I know when it is time to move on, and usually where to go.

It's a little bit like being the cat who curls up next to people in the rest home, or that woman who could smell disease. Except it's about technology in ecosystems of production and consumption. It's a feeling you have to interrogate to figure out why.

it's why I write things like http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween9.html#itanium which begat http://catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html

(And then of course http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#26-06-2011 because I'm not perfect.)

This is indirectly about Twitter, where I got frustrated enough last month to block someone who was dissing mastodon, because complaining about the lifeboats when the Titanic is sinking struck me as counterproductive.

I didn't have the spoons to argue about how leaving an obviously burning building and trying to build shelter from the blizzard outside may have a certain amount of time pressure if you want good results.

But https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/tumblr-to-add-support-for-activitypub-the-social-protocol-powering-mastodon-and-other-apps/ is this problem set's equivalent of Intel licensing AMD's x86-64 instruction set. To quote the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, "The choice has been made".

I vaguely expect Mastodon itself to go the way of the IBM PC eventually. (But where are the clones, there ought to be clones, send in the clones...) Then again IBM participated in the ecosystem it once led for a long time. Aptivas, ThinkPads...

TL;DR quote tweets are inevitable. Just link with a comment for now.

I just followed back the person I'd blocked on Twitter. According to Wikipedia[citation needed], Mastodon started November with 655k active users and ended it with 7 million. At this point the fediverse has critical mass to survive _regardless_ of what happens to other sites.

https://mastodon.lol/@skye/109450317713028179

Those other sites have a business model demanding not just profit delivered to investors, but perpetual increase. Capitalism treats sustainability as failure. They can't NOT corner the market.

(And yes the above begats led to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=0m29s and then https://lwn.net/Articles/629362/ and http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2020-July/019938.html and so on. My todo list runneth over. I've been accused of trying to boil the ocean...)

Good idea: prune twitter followers you follow on mastodon. I'm still following @cstross and @dianeduane and @sarahtaber and so on over on twitter, and don't need to since they're active here. Work your way down...
https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/109459092466440573

Once upon a time Moleskine WAS good. Google gave out Moleskine notebooks at Penguicon circa 2003/2004. Alas, Moleskine then did the same "cheap out on the materials" thing Pyrex did a couple years later (when Pyrex stopped being laboratory grade borosilicate glass and turned into normal glass dyed blue), and Moleskine's paper quality became terrible.

Late stage capitalism sees sustainability as failure, and MUST squeeze blood from every stone or the CEO gets fired.

https://fadeverb.tumblr.com/post/702476608089522176/moleskine-bad-its-so-bad-and-i-hate

Third party app makers switching to mastodon https://indieweb.social/@tchambers/109463070342898569 is the logical response to twitter's "war on apps" a decade ago https://twitter.com/landley/status/344863226267332608

Twitter was leveraging its dominance for profit long before the Muskrat bought it. The decline of twitter is catalyzed by a clueless silver spoon billionaire, but the fundamental rot is capitalism.

Twitter was a capitalist site driven to grow past sustainability by squeezing blood from a stone. Captain Dickrocket made a joke offer to buy twitter (the price was a weed reference) and Twitter's capitalist management literally took him to court to follow through on it.

The reason "the cruelty is the point" (ala https://twitter.com/DaveKeonsCousin/status/1599433639091392512) is a specific brand of zero-sum thinking, as explained in the article "for me to win, you have to lose" (https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/for-me-to-win-you-have-to-lose).

If there's a fixed amount of happiness in the world, reducing others' happiness must increase yours. Them being happy must reduce your happiness.

The premise is false, but religion and totalitarianism teach from birth NEVER to question your assumptions.

I am so tired of octagenarians arguing with septuagenarians about how to run the country.

@lesley It would be something "run start encoding" (or run index encoding) but it's never stored or transmitted that way because it's guaranteed to be a less efficient storage format for the same data (storing absolute indexes takes more bits than storing run lengths) and converting one to the other is 0(n).

For context, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transform

@fade I sort of _do_ employ an ornamental hermit.

Kings always "move fast and break things", like peasants' houses and bodies and food supply.

Privilege is blinding. Can't see the forest for the trees. Chopping the trees down to get visibility destroys the very thing they didn't understand.

https://wandering.shop/@slhuang/109459681374573988

@dalias maximum post length is a server setting, and the web view on the server I'm on does a "click for more" thing at the end of 500 characters for imported posts.

Capitalism destroys value in order to concentrate wealth. It corners markets and clear-cuts any resource it can find.

It's like breaking a $1,000 shop window to steal a $200 TV. The shopkeeper lost far more than the thief gained (plus opportunity cost, clean up, repair fees).

Capitalism calls these costs "externalities" which don't matter as long as the recipient centralizing the wealth doesn't have to pay them.

Neoliberalism is smash-and-grab as governing strategy.

https://mastodon.social/@that_wazzock/109461761683462669

@fade those people who can't read in dreams don't know what they're missing..

@wordshaper @SteveBellovin @jsrailton Twitter spans enough jurisdictions that plenty of governments get a bite at the apple. That's why they had such a large legal department in the before times.

@fade so avoidance collaboration then.

I keep wanting to link @fade to things she reblogged (here and on Tumblr). I guess that's the sign of a healthy relationship?

@elipariser I remember 20 years ago people reading bayesian chain output (used in spam to defeat beysian Spam filters) and finding it hilarious. I could not see the appeal. Still don't.

And I don't want to feed it.

@HowardTayler I'm not sure the "movable type puts scribes out of business" cycle has actually accelerated since Photoshop was invented and people worried you'd never be able to trust a news photo again?

When people turn 50 it gets way harder to keep our heads above the waters of change. I've noticed this fairly strongly in myself, but Dave Barry wrote about it 20 years ago and Roman senators orated it. @cstross had a blog entry I can't find...

@isaacs science is all about trying to disprove hypotheses...

I'm sure this is a valuable case study of something, but I'm not sure what:

https://m6n.io/@fuzzychef/109462617404377728

(No that's not a clickbait headline, it's @Gargron continuing to refuse to support link tweets. I could add a screenshot like everyone else, but can't be bothered. I'm waiting for the project fork.)

Blinking at the URL https://youtube.com/@TheSun and going "that's not a mastodon instance"...

Good related analysis, talking about network effects and emotionally sticky nodes in the life and decline of social media sites: https://mastodon.social/@zephoria/109462011665932747

@ChrisO_wiki I never understand why the supervillain who constantly shoots his minions doesn't run out of minions. If working for this guy has such a high attrition rate...

@dalias 10 years ago was 2013. Why aren't mask mandates where they were in 2013?

Remember when Covid was threatening to kill 2-5% of the population and leave as many permanently disabled? "Why are we not treating the flu as seriously?"

As for hospitals staffing, this is from 2013 https://www.cnn.com/2013/12/05/opinion/kohn-hospitals-medicaid-close/index.html and of course the AMA has been intentionally restricting medical school admissions since 1970, see https://bradhicks.livejournal.com/432458.html and https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/14/us/ama-board-studies-ways-to-curb-supply-of-physicians.html and https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/03/15/ama-scope-of-practice-lobbying/

@luckytran@med-mastodon.com Sigh, my reply went to the person you reblogged instead of to you. https://mstdn.jp/@landley/109465775912036380

@esther@strangeobject.space In my feed people are using it like the old "livejournal cut". A little intro summary then click to expand. (At least they were before I told the viewer to just always expand them.)

I have childhood trauma about injections, but there's no "CW: needles" in vaccination discussion. I know someone who's so allergic to mangos she had to use an epi-pen once from the SMELL and does NOT want to see them, but you can't "CW: mango". Outgoing CW doesn't work conceptually.

@zorinlynx The Steak-Umm account could totally thrive here.

@thomasfuchs @NeoQwerty Huh, I hadn't even noticed those summary info boxes. My brain filtered them out as a form of advertising.

@ParanoidFactoid @paparatti I remember the beysian text chains spammers generated to escape beysian spam filters 20 years ago, and how everybody thought the result was amusing to read. (Never saw the appeal myself.) And then spellcheckers grew syntax checkers...

And now the spammers are collecting feedback from humans reacting to the generated results so they can update the automatic lie machines futher. Why are people engaging for free? (Still don't see the appeal.)

@paulidin Also the voice of Tony the Tiger in the frosted flakes ads.

@andrewfeeney @kevlin @cwebber@octodon.social I await the first big lawsuit against the model makers from somebody hurt by the result. GPT generated medical, legal, or investment advice passed off as human. The deep pockets are those who paid to train the model, then make it class action...

Protest works. https://sfba.social/@twrling/109469211614765283

Late stage capitalism must corner every market, or it dies. Bottled water must prove tap water unsafe to drink (see Flint Michigan). You can cook at home and feed your family, but can't feed the homeless without a license and inspections. Any alternative is ruthlessly suppressed.

Here they come for wikipedia:
https://ioc.exchange/@vortex_egg/109469202151377952

Mastodon is just new and small, not immune. Capitalism will try hard to devour or destroy it the more important it becomes.

@dalias @fade I've replied to several of your boosts, but I have to add your name manually. It only replies to the original author by default.

And I continue to put links to Mastodon posts in a bunch of my posts. The maintainer having his head up his ass just means we need a better activitypub client.

@evacide Speaking of reporting, the creepiest thing I saw on YouTube recently was https://youtu.be/gSRc1DScOY8 and I am honestly unsure about their policies...

@mos_8502 I'd ask @persephinae about that...

@seldo @dalias https://ohai.social/@WookieCat/109470531344417107

Creative types can have both a resume and a portfolio. These supplement each other (and done properly, multiply each other).

The resume shows you can work as part of a team in a professional environment: show up sober, complete assignments by deadline, not punch out coworkers, etc.

The portfolio provides examples of work you've done, for direct examination.

If you're a computer programmer, your open source contributions are your portfolio.

@nova Wikipedia isn't the example of sustainability. Worldcon is.

@dalias The only way I ever found anything on the bird side was by downloading my archive. You could work out a URL to the live post from the archive in the old CSV format. I never bashed through the new format from 2019 to make anything useful out of it.

Here's an example of a Mastodon instance with a "gaslight" button. In my client there's no way to see previous versions, and no indication the reblog was edited other than that it says it is.

https://mstdn.social/@joshsternberg/109472681621458357

I'm using the official Mastodon client, which is widely acknowledged to be crap, but there had better be something baked into the protocol so "Ye" can't make a viral post about his music and then edit it into praise for some dictator later. Or a trilby wearer make a threat against someone and then gaslight it to a comment about their choice of shoes when they try to tell anyone.

Wayne's World is a Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure AU.

"Party Time! Excellent!" vs "Be excellent to each other. Party on dudes."

@dalias That also trusts the instance not the recipients to maintain the history. A bad instance could maintain plausible deniability for a while, or have poor security. The protocol needs some kind of anti-tamper signatures.

@dalias Still shows up in other people's feeds for some amount of time. Any sufficiently viral post becomes a target for hacking the original instance (or user's login), a Kanye->Ye style devolution may have a sudden break, performance artists like that Jordanian Peterman clown may try to save up credibility...

I'm not saying it's an unmanageable attack vector, just that it is one. There's a reason birdsite never implemented this: they wanted to, but couldn't solve it.

if America could turn Yojimbo into "A Fistful of Eastwood", Japan can totally make Wayne No Sekai with lots of katanas and transformation sequences.

Although I'm still waiting for that film where a Japanese salaryman in Tokyo is regularly drawn into cowboy gunfights which he always wins with his trusty six shooter.

@dalias Does $8-chan refer to the site or the "extremely divorced" middle-aged white guy who bought it?

@left_adjoint Ownership, attribution, and sustainability are three different things.

@left_adjoint @mxmxyz Universal Basic Income and citing your sources have nothing to do with intellectual property law, and are often harmed by them.

@fade do you need to tell Plauatus to stop trying to make [word] happen?

Well that didn't take long. https://newsie.social/@jeff/109472272956314954

@bcrypt I just spent several hours tracking down a segfault to glibc getting confused (probably by vfork) and enabling thread cancellation in a non-threaded program, using uninitialized thread cancellation state, meaning it was calling rt_sigaction(null) right after the successful syscall.

This is probably the halfway point of this particular debugging session.

The official Mastodon app is confused by "Http://" and says there is no app for this action.

This thing has had absolutely zero testing, hasn't it?

It won't even let me copy the URL and paste it into the browser myself, just because a letter is capitalized...

@dalias Identifying problems and identifying solutions are two different passes.

@StevenBeschloss neither the Oklahoma City bombing nor 9/11 were pulled off by a large group.

Why did "Skeleton Knight in Another World" recycle the "One Punch Man" theme song?

Is there a baldness-related genre convention I'm unaware of here?

@BethO we do regulate vehicle sizes: if they're too small you can't get a tax deduction for them. https://www.taxplanning.com/single-post/vehicles-over-6-000-pounds

Okay I think I've got it: the annual meeting of billionaires is Davos, the founder of the Daleks is Davros, and the acronym describing abusers is Darvo.

@traineyjr it's probably not y2038 compliant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Looks like the bird site has recognized Mastodon as a threat. https://indieweb.social/@ethanz@octodon.social/109479073170955454

@ChrisO_wiki actually more or less.

In a way this is what I'm trying to do with Android (https://landley.net/toybox/about.html) by making the base OS a self hosting development environment.

https://kolektiva.social/@trashrobot/109479425159800636

You should be able to use old phones as general purpose computing devices, building new stuff from source as necessary. The hardware already plugs into a USB hub (which keeps it powered even with an old battery, and can provide wired net access without a SIM card). The rest is just software.

Huh, so THAT's what we walked past to/from runoff voting.

Two ambulances, a fire truck, a life flight helicopter overhead and multiple police cars on the way there (before 6pm) with people clustered around a parked car with its hazard lights on. On the walk back WAY more police cars (now blocking off the sidewalk) and loudspeakers repeatedly demanding someone come out of an apartment.
https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/apd-responding-to-active-swat-situation-in-east-austin/

@nova People massively underestimate the impact 50 years of breathing leaded gas fumes had on the boomers. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scientist-who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it

Sigh. As far as I can tell, the only way to get thunderbird to STOP opening links in mozilla is to uninstall mozilla.

@SpaceLifeForm I think changes made in the config editor aren't saving or something?

@SpaceLifeForm This is Thunderbird. Incompetence is inherent.

@SpaceLifeForm Hanlon's Razor sings its song, doo dah, doo dah...

Linux Weekly News did a mastodon writeup last week. https://lwn.net/Articles/916154/

@sarahtaber Is warnock still 51 if they lost one? I was looking forward to not having to care about manchin ever again.

@fade according to TV tropes, the article that introduced "the smurfette principle" (there can be only one) was in the New York times in 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/07/magazine/hers-the-smurfette-principle.html

@dalias @sarahtaber I was unaware she was leaving the Senate and would not be participating in any future vote.

@_L1vY_ The boomers were also uniquely poisoned for 50 years breathing leaded gasoline fumes. As with acid rain and the ozone hole, people have forgotten the massive scope of the problem now it's been addressed: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scientist-who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it

Lead exposure did significant measurable neurological damage even before age-related mental decline started to stack on top of it:
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/lead-gasoline-blunted-iq-half-us-population-study-rcna19028

When they themselves said "never trust anyone over 30 (in November 1964) they were (contextually) right.

@dalias @sarahtaber if she votes against a bill they still need McMansion.

@fade I avoided linking you directly to TV tropes because TV tropes, but that's the one they cite. I was hoping they would have "see also" for the adjacent principles, but didn't spot it.

@seldo Do you know what sparked the ongoing uprising in China? Chinese citizens watching the world cup saw stadiums full of unmasked people and realized the rest of the world was no longer under permanent house arrest.

@seldo Because all those fans in the stands were "the people of Qatar", sure.

I'm sure you personally have never used any electronics from China, what with the Uyghurs and surveillance and suicide nets at foxconn...

@annaleen Dunbar's number?

@seldo I've never had the slightest interest in soccer and I think Jon Oliver's multiple episodes on the rot at FIFA years ago probably should have resulted in some kind of prosecution.

I just think your attempt to shame people is actively counterproductive.

I'm considering unfollowing Rich because he reblogs stuff he thinks people should be outraged about 50 times per day, and I'm full thanks. (Like Rachel Maddow's "and there's nothing you can do about it" ending every segment. Got tired.)

Dunbar's number goes to voicemail.

@SpaceLifeForm I had to abandon IMAP in 2012 because it didn't scale, and because Gmail and Thunderbird had conflicting design assumptions. Pop3 fetching of email locally is the only way that's worked for me for a decade now.

https://landley.net/notes-2012.html#06-02-2012
https://landley.net/notes-2012.html#12-02-2012
https://landley.net/notes-2012.html#15-10-2012
https://landley.net/notes-2012.html#20-10-2012

(I miss kmail but it was tied to the boat anchor of KDE. Balsa was crap. Text email clients don't work with my habit of having 30 open reply windows.)

@vallery because the Bay area has rigorously denied permits to anyone trying to build downtown apartments and forced everyone earning less than half a million a year out of even Oakland.

@vaurorapub I've always approached it in terms of traction and momentum. Hard to start, hard to stop.

@vaurorapub @nocturtle@mastodon.online gotta swing the wrecking ball...

@rvawonk it's also what their sponsor Russia has been doing to Ukraine for months.

Checking bird site about twice a week I sigh a bit that some people who've made accounts here still mostly use the old place (Gondor needs no context: https://twitter.com/NeolithicSheep/status/1601704843998949377) but... it's almost comfortingly familiar?

I've never had a Faceboot account (like AOL before it) or a Windows machine (went straight from OS/2 to Linux). With proprietary products/services "this too shall pass" is guaranteed. Maybe not on a useful timeframe, but progress is being made towards an inevitable conclusion.

Checking on an account that posts interesting stuff: I've scrolled back 30 posts and not quite made it 4 hours back in the timeline yet.

Nope, not following a firehose. Blogs exist for a reason.

I don't mind things like https://mastodon.social/@ChrisO_wiki/109491835129024072 as much because I can treat them as a block.

Having to individually evaluate each of those without knowing where it ends is a much higher cognitive sorting load. I am custodially saturated, thanks. Categories, containers, and indexing done for me helps a LOT. I am juggling many other balls.

It's a pity 15/ is useful thread labeling and the entire CW infrastructure here is the opposite: I must click through and read behind it to see if I care.

The way to favorite a post via link to someone you don't follow is to cut and paste the URL of the post into the search bar, then favorite it when it comes up under that.

Yes, the maintainer refuses to implement link-post support, because he has his head entirely up his ass. The project will be forked. Give it time.

https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109490517990695654

@valkyrie I miss David Graeber. "You make a cup once, you wash it a thousand times." He wrote a whole book about Direct Action in 2008: https://www.amazon.com/Direct-Action-Ethnography-David-Graeber/dp/1904859798

David Graeber would have LOVED the fediverse.

@mekkaokereke @Teri_Kanefield Agreed.

The only reason to support octagenarian democrats is the "let's you and him fight" style of diplomacy. 90% of their value is keeping a republican out of office. A potted plant would be about as useful.

Their natural inclination is to line the pockets of corporations giving them multi-million dollar "speaking fees". They do damage more slowly and the other side is exponentially worse but that's not an endorsement. Nixon supported UBI, democrats stopped it.

@nuttycom The downside, of course, is that if they revisit it 6 months later none of them will have the slightest idea how it works, and even small modifications will turn into a complete rewrite. (I was a teenage programmer too, once.)

@jfparis most instances have a patreon link.

@sarahtaber it's not even an "again": The Tobacco Institute was essentially a reorganization of the Ethyl institute, which existed to defend lead in gasoline. then they moved on to climate change denialism. It's been the same set of researchers working at the same set of think tanks for almost a century. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tobacco-and-oil-industries-used-same-researchers-to-sway-public1/

@dalias Given that the protocol does not require centralized reporting, I'm honestly not sure how accurate the growth figures are? A lot of reshuffling has gone on with people moving off of big instances to small instances, or setting up two or three accounts to start with and then consolidating to one (ala Charles Stross).

A bunch of Twitter forwarder bot feeds got set up and then shut down again when the person in question moved. I have no idea how you account for that in "line go up".

@dalias "All of Those People moving in who are Not Us shouldn't be Allowed, we must police them thoroughly."

Bog standard European response to everything as far as I can tell? Being conquered by Rome sucked, can't be on the receiving end of that again. Do unto others, full stop...

@dalias which is a maintenance nightmare and means what you ship is most likely generated code. (Note the and, not or.)

@VPS_Reports@kolektiva.social It's the most car happy city in the country, and the oil companies have dropped the mask.

@pkrugman Peter Zeihan wrote multiple books about this over the past decade. Predicted all but the pandemic.

@joshsusser@neurodifferent.me The French built a machine to address this problem back in the 1700s. They had to work their way through Napoleon afterwards, but in the long term it seems to have worked out for them quite well.

@graydon @dalias That third one is in large part because the Boomers went senile after breathing leaded gasoline exhaust fumes for 50 years, and the two combine VERY BADLY:

https://landley.net/notes-2020.html#19-11-2020

Once enough Boomers die the system should tilt back to being able to process at least some factual information.

The midpoint of the baby boom was 1955 (half of all Boomers were born before then), life expectancy in the USA is now 77 (went down 2 years in pandemic), so the LD50 of Boomers is 2032

@malwaretech You can also set it private, and unfollow everyone who's moved to Mastodon. Makes line go down.

@malwaretech rule 17 of the internet: any data retained long enough will leak.

@anniebeeknits @fade "The three-day shows were about digging the hole essentially". Truer words...

@recursive hybrasil is sinking? (From Erik the Viking.)

Finally reclaimed my old birdsite account to change the profile to point here, and posted an explanatory thread:

https://twitter.com/landley/status/1602499729136533506

And yes I kept each post in that thread down to 140 characters. Go out as you lived.

(Changing a thing out from under me without my consent and waiting for me to "come around" has not, historically speaking, been an effective strategy.)

It's my duty as a scientist to respond to new information, re-evaluate, and change my mind as necessary even including previously fundamental beliefs. (That's how I became a nudist, went from GPL to 0BSD, and so on.)

But "this is it, deal"? The sun's only got so much hydrogen. I can wait.

@skinnylatte I still miss Kwajalein, in the marshall islands. Haven't been there since I was 10, but it set my baseline in a lot of ways.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Birdsite has reached Gandhi-con 3.

https://mastodon.social/@JoeUchill/109503623998215158

@b0rk Start with the oldest failure you can find. The crash is more interesting than flying shrapnel.

People keep treating eating meat and burning wood as "carbon intensive" when that all that carbon came from the atmosphere over the past decade.

They treat "the CO2 from coal is recycled into soap" as carbon capture, when THAT carbon was in the ground for the whole of recorded history and they're delaying its release into the atmosphere for ~5 years.

Methane has a ~7 year half life in an oxygen atmosphere. I don't care about cow burps. You're either digging up fossil carbon or you're not.

The oil companies are pointing fingers at animal products exactly the same way the plastic companies are pointing fingers at plastic drinking straws.

The same way california's agriculture industry (using 80% of the state's water) insist people in cities must take shorter showers and use special toilets.

That's not the problem. If you don't understand what the problem IS, you're easily distracted by irrelevant "solutions" that do not address the problem.

@thespoonless @Zendadaist I'm curious, the virus has 2019 in the name and we're about to go into 2023. We've done a 3 years of mitigation and three rounds of vaccination.

At what point DO you get to stop? Or is this just your life now, for the rest of it?

@b0rk A reproducible test case is one of the most valuable things in programming. A bug "goes away" the same way a cockroach escapes under the fridge: it just got worse.

Bugs are like movie villains. Habeas corpus or it doesn't count, and even then if you haven't dissected the body it's probably fake. "Gone for now" is the BAD outcome.

(I may have been lucratively called in to refinance the technical debt of a few "nine fives of uptime" projects over the years, and developed... opinions.)

This bug wasn't a Mac OS kernel issue, it was ifndef O_PATH define O_PATH linuxvalue which on MacOS was already used by O_SYMLINK.

The previous bug wasn't misbehaving glibc thread plumbing, it was a signal handler inappropriately inherited by a child process they tried to use global data the child process had repurposed.

Glowering at the bug I've been ignoring because it only reproduces in a Fedora VM and is happening inside the glibc FILE object. Yes, that's taking a bullet, but from where?

It's hard to feel productive when you're taking multiple days to come up with a one-line fix. (Sure I wrote a thousand lines of scaffolding along the way, but you tear that down again when you have your answer.)

In professional programming, adding a thousand lines of code to avoid having to come up with that one line fix makes everybody's numbers look good. In open source we spend a lot of time looking like we didn't do anything. Oh well...

@themedievaldrk @dalias @garius Early in my career I watched venture capital destroy my employer, and analogized it to handing a non-swimmer a scuba tank and telling them there's a bigger scuba tank at the bottom of the ocean.

Most professional services companies work like law firms or dentist offices: three experts and a support staff. VCs want the next Microsoft, funding from operations while small ruins the fantasy. Gotta hire 500 people to show "growth" to get the next funding round.

@fade @themedievaldrk They are lovely socks.

@themedievaldrk That's a central flaw of capitalism.

My objections to VC were more specifically 1) that's the opposite of teaching someone how to swim, 2) making the recipients lie (to themselves) about the nature of the business.

A corner bodega is not Whole Foods. That's not a "flaw" in their business model. A food truck that's still a food truck 10 years later has successfully stayed in business, not "failed to franchise".

@Popehat FDR's "I welcome their hatred" speech remains inspiring a century later. Know them by the quality of their enemies...

Back on the bird site, I'd link to a lot of enraging stuff from my account, but cut and paste links to happy things to the household slack.

I don't particularly want to broadcast bad things on Mastodon. There's plenty of places to find that, and the Boomers are dying as fast as they can.

Seriously, the horrors of the past few years are Boomerdamarung, magnified by 50 years of chronic lead exposure. It's amazing that in senility they're functional as they are:

https://landley.net/notes-2020.html#19-11-2020

I'm still reluctant to "boost" much because of my history with twitter (long before twitler bought it), but lots of nice stuff goes by here.

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cs/109506997549142245

https://plush.city/@heatherhorns/109094054278022990

https://varmint.town/@CatsOfYore/109508739745179417

@dalias It was an explicit strategy I blogged about back in 2010:

https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#04-07-2010

https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#11-09-2010

@AriCohn Real estate and broadcast spectrum are finite public resources exclusively allocated. That's always been the basis for regulating them: letting you broadcast on this frequency or build a house there prevents anyone else from doing it.

Cable TV escaped the broadcast regulations because it wasn't a finite resource. Faux News leveraged that regulatory escape to create a propaganda network with the illusion of federal scrutiny forcing them to speak only truth.

https://landley.net/notes-2017.html#04-10-2017

@dalias Capitalism always collapses into fascism. That's why the Great depression led to the rise of the Nazis.

Mark Blyth did some great talks on this, one example:

https://youtu.be/tJoe_daP0DE

@jchidley The original insight is from @sarahtaber in an old thread at https://twitter.com/sarahtaber_bww/status/1006363794556227589

Once upon a time there were a bunch other sites mirroring those threads, but twitler seems to have gotten all mirrors taken down so when twitter fails google can't find them. I hope she reposts them somewhere, or maybe revisits them in her podcast...

@amart Linux Weekly News - @LWN

@ct_bergstrom @dalias The bureaucrats who worked for nazi germany hoping to "mitigate" wound up collaborators.

The guy who wrote https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html was recently on a podcast at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/miles-taylor-and-the-truth-about-the-trump-white/id1547658204?i=1000582741014 where (about 19 minutes in) he says:

"I put out an anonymous op-ed that basically said don't worry america, the adults are in the room they know the president's crazy and that's scary but they're trying to keep him in check. I was totally fucking wrong about that..."

@dalias I remember writing for The Motley Fool forever ago when my friday article got slashdotted and the site metrics attributed it to the column, which had its monday article up (by a different author) already, and that author told us (4 authors total in a, common chat room) about how unusually interested people were in the (completely different) topic he'd covered and his planned follow-up article...

The problems with managing what you measure aren't _just_ Goodhart's Law...

People relied on goat entrails to assist with decision making for centuries. Using AI for that purpose is fundamentally no different than opening the Bible to a random page and reading a few sentences for advice on what to do about a specific current issue.

Humanity is darn good at seeing faces in clouds, it's why we invented so many imaginary friends and called them gods or dryads or leprechauns. Inserting GPT3 into a decision loop is the modern version:

https://hci.social/@msbernst/109513446817407011

@sarahtaber in the case of Einstein specifically, he stole at least half his work from his first wife.

@mmasnick so livetweeting literally anything involving actual people violates the TOS. Speeches, sportsball, ted talks, any geolocatable live stream...

Ok, that's "Inception" levels of incompetence: https://twitter.com/KToropin/status/1603136282376474632

Twitler got his fee-fees hurt being booed on stage by the audience of a comedian currently best known for making fun of trans people.

He lashed out by blocking the account of the college student who has been posting the publicly available tracking data of his jet for years now.

To "justify" this, Twitler retroactively changed Twitter's policy so livetweeting a TED talk violates it.

New versions of the streisand effect tracker immediately went up here and on hipstergram and so on, which twitler blocked the URLs of... via exact match. If you stick an #anchor tag on the end of the URL it goes through.

Sigh.

@timberwraith @gwensnyder is there some sort of plug-in to do that automatically? Or maybe a feature in one of the phone apps?

@dalias @elonjet punching up versus punching down.

@susankayequinn The main reason guillotining the billionaires isn't within the Overton window yet is people are waiting for the boomers to die.

@pikhq The Linux community went through this in 2004, and I didn't see the appeal at the time: https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/bayes_spam_filters.html

@dalias any idea for a good site to move off of GitHub to?

@b0rk I've seen "bounds checker" and "leak detector".

Old and busted: metaverse
New hotness: mastodon fediverse

I wonder how many Boomers stuck on Faceboot think the first is an abbreviation of the second?

Ah right, Boomers: s/think/believe/

Yeah yeah, #notallboomers

@stephenfry Weird al will chase any other song out of your head except Girl from Ipanema. (You're on your own with that one).

Gumming "Girl from Ipanema" will also chase any other song out of your head, but the downside is then you have that stuck in your head.

P.S. I still don't know the weight of San Jose. Do we include only the stuff sticking up above the surface, or everything installed by humans? Native Americans terraformed the soil... And that's ignoring the air, of course.

@SexyCyborg Red Lobster.

@briankrebs Yes and no. Every server independently pulls the page to generate the summary, so each server you have a follower on counts as a click.

Replication is not a backup. https://infosec.exchange/@SwiftOnSecurity/109452054873199073

@SwiftOnSecurity It's called "unix" for a reason.

@themedievaldrk I'm GenX. We didn't get as _much_ pediatric lead poisoning before they took it out of the gasoline, but I don't really expect my generation to have the spare neurons to handle age-related mental decline gracefully either.

Luckily we've never been the ones driving, so getting Grandpa to stop regularly running over pedestrians at age 90 might be less of an issue? Power is going to pass over us straight to the millennials I expect. I intend to vote for AOC as soon as she can run...

@cstross I've been voldemorting him as twitler.

@miss_s_b I've been voldemorting him as twitler when it comes up, but I also consider bringing him up on Mastodon to be in the "ranting about your ex to each new person you meet" bucket.

Yes the trash fire is impressive, but it's also visible for orbit. They can see it themselves just fine...

@0xabad1dea Congratulations! You can still link to a page that links to the thing, of course...

@thomasfuchs Nah, just stop awarding them huge government contracts. They're at most 18 months ahead of the competition.

@seananmcguire I followed you from livejournal, and we're both still here.

@seananmcguire @the_gneech Take your time. You're here, we like you, this is a hobbyist run convention not a professional media con with a corporate owner. The art show is half set up, the dealer's room is still locked, the panel schedule is stuck at the printer's, but the bar is open and there are already room parties.

Pitch your tent and people will find you. It's not a race. You're doing good.

@Angle @seananmcguire It's a hobbyist run space. Every once in a while there's a horror story about someone handcuffing themselves to a sprinkler and taking down their instance, but there's lots of these little spaces and you meet the same faces in the hallway track and the masquerade.

@seananmcguire @Angle I am using the official Mastodon client, which is widely acknowledged to be the worst possible Mastodon client, and I've still managed to post cat pictures with it.

Peejee is 19 and there is a heating pad set on high under that fluffy blanket.

@sarahtaber The Wikipedia page calls it the Streisand effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

@kerileighmerritt He might _also_ be dumb.

Remember how a couple days back I dug up my old birdsite account from 3 years ago to point everyone following it here?

You know how I tend to wait until the last minute to do... most things?

Children of the 8-bit machines can smell when a platform is ending and it's time to move on. Didn't want to be right, but blocking links to Mastodon is Gandhi-Con 3.

First ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

@seenigel @dalias "Gradually, then suddenly." - Earnest Hemingway

@claytoncubitt @kerileighmerritt see also the Gish Gallop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

@neolithicsheep People with actual legal knowledge have come up with good checklists for server admins: https://nitter.net/rahaeli/status/1593819064161665024

@KBSpangler twitler is doing a speed run.

@b0rk The opposite of clickbait headlines.

@chelseakomlo kind of can't do password entry without it.

@elithebearded @fade I want to lobby the state government to install a historical marker commemorating its own placement. "On this site at $DATE, a historical marker was placed."

@vaurorapub The Mozilla foundation is just embarrassing. Here's an old blog of mine with a bunch of links:
https://landley.net/notes-2020.html#30-08-2020

Which was shortly before they did:
https://lwn.net/Articles/833625/

And then the foundation tried to fund itself with Bitcoin: https://twitter.com/plinss/status/1478135256683143168

@SwiftOnSecurity @jerry @oneunderscore__ It's an anti-brigading measure. When too many follow requests come in at once it assumes the user is being dogpiled by trolls, and temporarily switches on follow approval. They can just click yes once on the whole batch.

The open source community needs a term for projects that release source but are developed by a proprietary company instead of a community.

For example: a browser with tab-local cookies would let you have different tabs logged into different GitHub accounts, which seems obviously useful.

Google Chrome will never offer that, because it defeats advertiser tracking. What the users want doesn't matter, they're not developing it.

@YusukelcuiferKaneko Hello.

@shortandslanted @ursulav Hence "stabby". https://mediachomp.com/stabby-the-space-roomba-humans-in-space-story/

@Patricia another trick is to go to the main page of interesting servers and pull up the "local timeline" and "federated timeline" of that server. Each server has a different one...

@drewharwell it's the radio version of a car's license plate/headlights/taillights/turn signals combined.

@drewharwell Airplanes broadcast their license plate via radio. The FAA has required them all to do this since the 1950s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFF_Mark_X

Half the arguments about drones in civilian airspace is that they don't have sufficient transponders:

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/resources/faq#q16

Twittler getting suddenly upset about this is like him getting suddenly upset about Apple's 30% cut of iPhone sales. He knew for years and agreed to it, then "forgot" when he donned the maga hat.

So say we all. https://mstdn.party/@gwensnyder/109526890776098302

@caragraph They annoyed me when they first showed up, for about a month. But I was linking to tweets long before they expanded, and my real gripe was adding _any_ link summaries without letting me say no.

Last administration I didn't want to link to things that would put the Resident's face in my timeline, and I don't want to link to things that put Twittler's face in my timeline now.

"Saves you a click to see what I'm commenting on": net positive.

@signalthirteen @tinker Heroes are ablative armor for a social order. They're a human sacrifice made to mitigate a systemic failure. The existence of heroes, like billionaires, indicates the system failed and needed heroic effort to continue.

Now that I've zapped my old account, I should put an html version of my archive at landley.net/twitter. I certainly tried loading that enough over the years...

So wait, All those League of Legends sponsorships on PrudeTube we're paid for with Scam Bankrupt-Fraud's money?

https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/109526352059607025

Oh right, Twittler has to maintain his security clearance for SpaceX to remain viable. And without SpaceX, his spylink sattelites only last 5 years each...

https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren/109525155409961073

And of course Tesla's real business isn't selling cars, it's selling carbon credits. It's government handouts all the way down with him.

https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a36266393/tesla-made-more-money-selling-credits-and-bitcoin-than-cars/

Twittler may be panicking because now that other car manufacturers are ramping up the F-150 lightning and so on, they don't need to buy Tesla's carbon credits anymore.

https://carboncredits.com/teslas-carbon-credit-sales-down-49-in-q2/

We just got mail at 7am from the US post office. A postal worker, with a post office van, dropped off a package on our front porch using a flashlight.

I knew Biden had signed a bill to fix the post office back in April (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-president-biden-signs-the-postal-service-reform-act-of-2022) which removed the pension prefunding liability ($50 billion albatross the GOP hung around the post office's neck under dubyah https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/annual-reports/fy2010/ar2010_4_002.htm) and nerfed trump's Postbastard General, but... dude.

7am delivery on a Saturday. Welcome back.

@oldrawgabbit I honestly can't think of anyone I know who still uses Facebook, and only one parasocial relationship (author Wen Spencer) who still posts there.

Lots of Tumblr. Several patreon. 2/3 of the people I followed on Twitter moved here or to one of those two by the time I deleted my account there. Several blogs/newsletters/forums/email lists still active, and a few new ones recently on places like substack.

But Facebook is... five years gone? Seven?

@hollybrigstocke @Quinnae_Moon Social media isn't new. I joined my first bulletin board in 1983, went from WWIV net to Fidonet to usenet to web forums to livejournal... I've had an internet connected email address for 30 years.

Livejournal was a huge centralization point that imploded in a matter of months: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Strikethrough_and_Boldthrough (leading to "archive of our own").

Freenode was acquired and imploded last year: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/freenode-irc-has-been-taken-over-by-the-crown-prince-of-korea/
https://lwn.net/Articles/857140/

@hollybrigstocke @Quinnae_Moon The livejournal community's response to being acquired by Russia and freenode community's response to being acquired by a Korean billionaire let me know exactly how Twitter would go down. Seen it before. Find or create a new site that works like Wikipedia instead of Capitalism, everyone moves there "gradually, then suddenly". Rupert Murdoch bought myspace...

"Old site blocks links to new site" is a predictable tourniquet when the migration s-curve tilts upwards.

@eloquence Clay Shirky pointed out that people have hated being "nickel and dimed" longer than that phrase has existed.

@dansinker you can migrate posts: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-to-another/

1) Export your data to an archive, 2) create the account on the new server, 3) import your archive on the new server, 4) forward your old account to point to the new account.

The reason for journalists not to blog through their employer is that if they go on strike they can't update their blog. But that's not specific to mastodon. (Plus the "my opinions are not the opinions of my employer" thing gets real thin.)

@boblord @jack_daniel @accidentalciso I've worked at over a dozen employers in my career, from IBM to a partnership with one other person. Sometimes my cubicle is at Johnson Controls and my payroll is handled through a recruiter with seven people on staff. I've worked for undigested acquisitions, small companies working onsite at large clients, been a subcontractor of a subcontractor... I believe my personal matryoshka record is four nested companies at once.

@eloquence and then HBO got acquired by right-wing octogenarian du jour and yanked dozens of things people liked from its archive and proved the pirates right.

Gritty explained succinctly.

https://mastodon.art/@MicroSFF/109530683957351479

@skinnylatte @georgetakei said company is still screwed if twitler loses his security clearance.

@sfierbaugh @tinker Why did nobody flag Trump's NFT cards as obviously AI generated? They had all the signs...

@vaurorapub Terry Pratchett worked through that years ago.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/190619-all-witches-are-selfish-the-queen-had-said-but-tiffany-s

@dalias @SwiftOnSecurity I have literally done that, and I stopped for a reason.

@mdb "if I ask for something specific, will I get it?" "such as?" "dunno."

David Letterman's retirement project is a Netflix series called "My Next Guest" where he spends an hour interviewing someone.

He just traveled to Ukraine to interview Zelenskyy. It's a _really_ good interview.

Moscow is attempting to destroy all of Russia's regional governments ahead of Putin's collapse, to give Moscow a head start in Russia's upcoming civil war.
https://mastodon.social/@ChrisO_wiki/109534240739797850

@davecl42 they were AI generated. That's how AI generation works.

@ubiquity75 Russia bought livejournal. Rupert Murdoch bought myspace. Twittler buying twitter is definitely a trailing indicator.

Especially the journalists who learned nothing from right-wing buyouts of the Wall Street Journal and Forbes and Newsweek and so on. Buying credibility and using like kleenex is what fascists do.

@sfierbaugh @tinker The current crop of AI images are just a follow-up to the morphing technology from Michael Jackson's "black or white" video 30 years ago, with a library of millions of images scraped from the internet and using all that "is this a stoplight" training data people have been feeding it via captcha for years to select sets of images to morph together.

Of course people are finding watermarks from the stolen source images in the result.

@dalias @bcrypt I expect @BunRab has some links.

@davecl42 Derived works are explicitly covered by copyright law, yes.

@dalias https://infosec.exchange/@tinker/109530594097960438

@lynncunliffe@mastodon.world @oldrawgabbit A tealight with an upturned clay flower pot over it is an old trick.

Here's a YouTuber overcomplicating it: https://youtu.be/GV23gAO7F8E

@lynncunliffe@mastodon.world @oldrawgabbit And here's a guy explaining why having more than one tea light under a given flowerpot, or putting it on a flammable surface, is probably a bad idea. (Also, the pot will get hot to the touch if you're doing it right.)

https://youtu.be/gHqeIkd56Ro

@emilybell @jeffjarvis @davew they're not building anything, they're being recruited.

@jeffjarvis @emilybell @davew Seemed like a fairly blatant attempt to control the narrative by controlling the narrators to me.

@lynncunliffe@mastodon.world @oldrawgabbit can't find a video doing the standard upturned pot with it's drainage tray as a stopper, one tea light under it, with the pot on on some bricks or something raising the pot up high enough that the tea light has plenty of air and does not overheat.

The ceramic pot catches and radiates the heat so it doesn't just all go up on the ceiling. It's not complicated.

@lynncunliffe@mastodon.world @oldrawgabbit People have run numbers:

https://theprepared.com/blog/can-a-flower-pot-and-tealight-candle-create-enough-heat-to-save-you-in-a-cold-emergency/

The trick is to heat a small space. Otherwise yeah you need a dozen of them going in parallel.

Good luck. I'm sorry tories still exist in 2022.

@oldrawgabbit @lynncunliffe@mastodon.world this is why the flower pot needs to be sufficiently above the tea light that the heat rising into the flower pot does not heat up the tea light until the wax catches outside of the wick.

Flower pot gets very hot, tea light should not get hotter than tea lights normally do. Also, this is why you use one tea light per pot instead of multiple ones.

@skinnylatte Price. That's basically it. Everything these days is an HDMI viewer.

With "smart tvs" they're cheap but you have to fight them to bypass the spyware and advertising insertion. It's the TV version of those burner phones sold at Walmart loaded up with adware.

@skinnylatte A couple of models of those if you give them internet access it's like an always-on Alexa streaming audio from your room back to the manufacturer in China.

@bkeegan Cooking with knives and fire, like programming in c, do not go out of style.

I have so far avoided the endless time sink that is Android app programming, but after using the official Mastodon client for several weeks now... wow I'm tempted to write one from scratch.

@dalias is that a nickname for the Korean dude who took over freenode? Because as someone who was on freenode, I didn't recognize it.

That's beyond preaching to the choir, that's excluding the choir too and only getting the other clergy in the room.

I have reached the point where I no longer click on links to Twitter, because I'm just not emotionally up for it.

Yes I've seen the threads about how Tevye's rooftop song about tradition definitely meant they all should have stayed to face the Bolsheviks together.

There's a "flee Nazi Germany" case and a "stay and fight for Ukraine" case but you built a community in a rental property and the USA's state religion (capitalism) lets the new slumlord burn it down for the insurance.

I can't watch.

@malwaretech First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Stage three. All the open source people expected this, because freenode did the same thing with libera chat last year:

https://slashdot.org/story/386026

@Popehat last year a Korean billionaire bought the open source IRC net "freenode", which was replaced by a new one within months.

The billionaire banning references to the new network is what started the mass exodus.

https://slashdot.org/story/386026

@deviantollam Billionaires buying social media sites always do this. This literally happened last year to a different site (the freenode irc network):

https://slashdot.org/story/386026

Livejournal's "strikethrough" was how archive of our own got started, when Russia bought them and the fascists started anti-gay banning campaigns:

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Strikethrough_and_Boldthrough

@tychotithonus I have not wanted to start a whack-a-mole search. That's at least as big a time sink...

Last year a Korean billionaire purchased the IRC network freenode, and the real mass exodus of users started when he banned anyone who mentioned the emerging alternative network:

https://slashdot.org/story/386026

15 years ago Russia bought livejournal, and "archive of our own" was created when fascists started banning content:

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Strikethrough_and_Boldthrough

Fascists literally never learn. If they could they wouldn't be fascists. The closest they get is trying to copy the past.

@b9AcE fire fighters fight fire, crime fighters fight crime, freedom fighters fight freedom.

@wendynather I'm always reluctant to reply to unknown texts, for the same reason most internet facing servers these days drop packets instead of sending NAKs.

I'm not confident enough in my understanding of the threat model to want to acknowledge that this is an active phone number, that it can receive texts rather than voice only, that the recipient speaks english, what hours I'm awake...

@themedievaldrk I deleted my birdsite account already. I'm used to years of people having a Facebook account I didn't read, AOL forums I wasn't in...

Guillotine the billionaires.

By which I mean the USA should change federal law so hoarding an offensive amount of capital is a capital offense, punishable by guillotine after full due process.

Lobbying to put the top tax rate back where it was in 1963 is a compromise position, not the opening offer.
https://doctorow.medium.com/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-will-eventually-stop-110ba9711133

Huh, mastodon has a symlink format (so I could have an arbitrary username on a webserver I control forward here):

https://guide.toot.as/guide/use-your-own-domain/

And somebody just wrote a generator for the link file format:

https://hachyderm.io/@shanselman/109537851479089923

@molly0xfff I like closure. I deleted my Twitter, and am trying to remember to back up my Mastodon weekly.

Apparently I need to run my own instance to import the historical post feed I downloaded though. Or at least my instance wouldn't let me do it. (Metadata like follow and block list yes, post history no.)

@mjg59 The amiga was a nommu system. Commodore bargained for the creation of the cheaper 680E30 with the MMU removed because AmigaOS _couldn't_ use an MMU: it was a microkernel system. It passed pointers around as "messages" and everybody just read/wrote the same structures. If it had to copy the data (or remap it), performance would have tanked.

People held the amiga up as an example of a microkernel that could do multimedia for _years_ without understanding how they did it...

@mjg59 Which hardware is it using? (Post-bankruptcy the name "commodore" bounced off a number of organizations. I only had a 1000 and 500, and then went to x86....)

@mjg59 Good luck.

@simon_bitdiddle @christianschwartz @malwareunicorn People change a lot slower than technology.

@mjg59 The amiga acquiring an MMU didn't mean the developer base and culture caught up. :)

@fade Could you see if ect or multiplexer are interested? Also, hi @BunRab https://mastodon.online/@sarahtaber/109538027829514449

@tinker It's like explaining the internet to AOL users. They'll figure it out eventually.

@themedievaldrk I try never to criticize anyone who finds themselves unable to leave an abusive relationship. The abuser is always 100% at fault.

@valkyrie "The workers control the means of production. The struggle of the urban proletariat."

"No it was Wolverhampton wanderers who beat Leicester 3-1."

https://youtu.be/vZ9myHhpS9s

@eschaton @mjg59 Pre-installed... by commodore? Meaning the new drivers added for Amiga specific hardware would have been produced/adapted by commodore engineers?

@matociquala

@sarahtaber many servers have a Patreon link on their about page.

@eschaton @mjg59 Having nothing to do with Amiga culture, but the drivers in question were written by Amiga engineers working at commodore.

@apiratemoo He's looking for a scapegoat. Somebody to sock puppet his decisions through.

@0xabad1dea there's some sort of data connection to a microcontroller on the brick that wears out long before the power connection does.

Try tilting the laptop so the battery points straight upwards while it's plugged in. I have no idea why that helps, but it sometimes does.

@0xabad1dea once it's managed to exchange a few packets with the brick, it continues to charge from it as long as it's plugged in. The microcontroller in the laptop caches the state or something.

I have, however, had the brick get very very hot while charging the battery and doing power intensive stuff with the laptop. It couldn't communicate to tell it to back off or something?

it's fine while the battery is full. Dell is weird.

@GossiTheDog @Gargron that was pretty much the problem I had with "line", Japan's version of Twitter. I had no idea who to follow except a couple of coworkers who almost never posted.

@SexyCyborg when they said sunlight is the best disinfectant...

The commodore Amiga intentionally didn't have an MMU because it was a microkernel OS. Its "message passing" was just passing pointers around and directly reading memory, and an MMU would have killed performance.

They even asked Motorola to create the 680E30 processor without an MMU to save money.

Alas chrome's :~:text=Why%20no%20MMU anchor search trick doesn't seem to work on PDFs, so you'd have to search for "Why no MMU?" yourself in https://amigaone.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/amiga-history-and-patent.pdf

For more on why microkernels suck, see the Tanenbaum-Tovalds debate: https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/appa.html

The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference, but in practice there is. And once "everybody knows" something, Max Planck's Principle applies:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-math-works

And then you get the 2005 Nobel prize in Medicine: https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank-infectious-broth-gave-himself-an-ulcer-and-solved-a-medical-mystery

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease (I.E. dunning-kruger at the OTHER end).

I am reminded of the explanation why Squirrel Girl can wield Excalibur, since she's descended from King Arthur and that squirrel Merlin set him up with: https://tyrantisterror.tumblr.com/post/623500793924993024/noreasonisreasonenough-spankzilla85

@shawrd773@zirk.us The Wall Street journal, Washington Post, and electronic frontier foundation have all done intro to Mastodon pieces.

@frontier has he announced which scapegoat he plans to sock puppet yet?

@georgetakei I think he's appointing a scapegoat he can sock puppet.

@KN3RDS @BlackAzizAnansi it's a bit like crop rotation.

@nadine_nonny I am impressed by his ability to make it worse.

@0xabad1dea it's somewhere between jubilee and crop rotation.

The polar vortex kept cold air contained at the North Pole. Climate change has destabilized it, so the cold air leaks down here instead of staying up there.

The freezer door is open and the ice cubes are melting, but we get a cool breeze. All the snow dumped on the USA melts in spring, while the polar ice caps are not replenished.

https://infosec.exchange/@spike/109540838444176842

@wdlindsy The images were obviously AI generated. The prompt probably wasn't even long.

@0xabad1dea sign up to continue reading.

@malwaretech there are already plugins that make a GIF of a post and attach it to the thing you're linking to.

The "you can't have it, you don't know how to use it, this is for your own good" guy is unlikely to win in the long term. He is giving screen readers a harder time though, and the plugins can't tell if you're linking to a protected account you follow or not. And they can't delete the post to stop it. Nor does it verify authenticity. So at least he's managing to make it worse.

@oldrawgabbit for a definition of quit that means appointing a scapegoat he can sock puppet.

@regehr there's the architecture specific elf specs, the syscall man page with the register argument assignments... what are you looking for?

@pikhq Checks mental inventory: coconuts, married a squirrel, size 10 Roman gladius...

@evacide this is like the duct tape and plastic sheeting people introducing blue into the alert levels isn't it?

I always have to look it up: they stuck Grover between Oscar and Bert.

@regehr I know that c++ puts the member names in the wrong order because of https://itanium-cxx-abi.github.io/cxx-abi/abi.html which were the first people to write up a detailed spec so a lot of other architectures followed them even though it was stupid.

@regehr https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/syscall.2.html has the architecture specific syscall register mapping. https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/ has some more...

@eniko Community is much higher commitment than audience. I'm subscribed to like 2% of the channels I watch on YouTube. I'm often in the audience for _years_ before trying to talk back.

@gwensnyder if you notice the tech it's immature tech.

@isaacs @JonnyT and in the absence of proper support for it people are implementing plugins that add a screenshot of the post with the link.

No check if it's a private account, no ability to delete the post, no verification that it was real, no support for screen readers...

@dalias a community is a subset of an audience. Demanding everyone write fanfic as a condition of watching the show doesn't scale very well.

@JonnyT @isaacs
I'm all for adding the feature. Refusing to add the feature doesn't stop people from linking to posts, it just means people aren't notified when their posts are linked to or where from.

The Mastodon maintainer has a personal dislike of the feature, and in the absence of a server-side implementation end users are hacking it in anyway.

@dalias This new network has a whole lot of toddlers telling newborns they're doing it wrong.

@janl I download my archive and use grep. Same as Twitter.

@janl Ah, missed what you were searching for.

@malwaretech If there is I expect trolls pointing their widely blocked twitter account to some mastodon acount they don't like to get a victim blocked in the new context.

@malwaretech "I control X, I point it at Y" is verifiable, so migrating follows seems reasonably secure. "Random other person controls X, they also point it at Y" is not verifiable, so migrating blocks is easily gamed. You probably need to assemble block lists in the new context?

Dowanna learn Ruby. Dowanna get involved in a new timesink. Dowanna maintain a fork of a project. Dowanna run my own mastodon server...

Loading my profile in the fourth web column and clicking "posts and replies" to add a P.S. reply to the post I just did (and thus start a thread) doesn't work if the tab is cached and showing me yesterday's info, but there's no "refresh just this column" and refreshing the page will refresh my home tab and lose my place working through a backlog of posts.

I have no idea why right clicking my profile photo and doing "open in new window" so I _can_ see a refreshed column of my posts where I can reply and extend a thread does the "proceed" pop-up when I then try to reply to it. It's the same website! You are asking _yourself_ for authentication! (And getting it, without me having to log back in. What's this extra step for? Seems insecure somehow. The redundant explicit request for credentials makes me dubious.)

Not a big deal. This is teething troubles. But Grognard the mastodon maintainer has already established himself as "somebody whose personal aesthetic opinions trump the expressed preferences of the vast majority of his userbase" on the quote reply issue, and thus somebody I'm not gonna bother to try to engage with via bug report.

"You cannot be trusted with this feature. It's open source, therefore I can prevent you from having it." Umm... not how it works? I await the fork...

Also, I have NO idea why the link to my blog doesn't show up as green in my profile? I cut and pasted their link thing, it's even on its own line now. It's within the first 1k of the page text.

$ wget https://landley.net/notes.html -O- 2>/dev/null | grep mstdn.jp | head -n 1
<a rel="me" href="https://mstdn.jp/@landley">mastodon</a>

I want <pre> in posts.

@natureworks ping for @ursulav

Also, can I get the "crying laughing" emoji out of the corner of the compose box, sneering at everything I write? Grognard insists link tweets are aggressive, and he puts that staring down at everything we type. Sigh.

@Ciaraioch The Rooster's jailhouse lament was sped up to provide the "hampsterdance" song.

@SexyCyborg It seems like tipping waiters to me: in the USA if you don't do it you're an asshole, in Japan if you do it you're being insulting.

Defund the police. https://mastodon.social/@UnicornRiot/109548755944422536

@micahflee @drewharwell @MattBinder @w7voa @tony Did the dude ever find a scapegoat to sock puppet as new CEO? Or is this a Boris Johnson situation where he resigns an then stays anyway?

@atomicpoet Me personally? Keep using plastic straws and taking long showers because that's not where the problem is.

@oldrawgabbit I wouldn't allow one of those in the house.

@cstross I think giant batteries to stick the wind into are more immediately interesting.

These guys seem to have the best tech for municipal container batteries:

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/09/28/ess-flow-battery-to-supply-200mw-2gwh-of-energy-storage-to-california-utility/

It's iron, road salt, water, and vinegar in a bunch of PVC pipes. It's all 1970s tech. Their patents are all around special filters (clever but still pool/aquarium level of complexity) that take it from a few hundred cycles to "the plumbing wears out long before the chemistry does".

@cstross P.S. I blogged my last research pass on them, with links to the source material:

https://landley.net/notes-2022.html#16-07-2022

Alas it isn't a home solution, it's municipal. Supplements electrial substations or attaches to an office park.

@cstross This video is the best intro to their tech I've seen so far. (Wadsworth constant 6 minutes.) Dude went to their factory and interviewed the founders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxGP9cYbwdk#t=6m

@FeralRobots @cstross And there's room for improvement. Shipping containers are designed to stack up to eight high, but ESS's current deployment doesn't seem to be vertically stacking them at all? Presumably later generations of the tech can upgrade density pretty easily, but right now they're optimizing for maintenance I guess.

I used to follow them at @ess_info@twitter.com when I had an account there, and they linked to all sorts of talks and articles...

@robryk @cstross does an hour-long interview with the CEO talking about the technology count? https://youtu.be/LPm3fgxbgg8

@robryk @cstross I suspect there was some due diligence along the way to going public? https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/11/ess-battery-company-backed-by-bill-gates-softbank-opens-on-nyse.html

@robryk @cstross did you see my original thread where I linked to my blog entry with what I knew about them, and the video of the guy who went to their factory and had them open up one of the containers and explain what was inside?

@robryk @cstross Odd. It shows up for me: https://mstdn.jp/@landley/109551851654546174

@robryk @cstross There's a bunch of container battery companies like Ambri and Form Energy that never shipped anything, which I consider basically scams. (Ambri gave a great 2012 ted talk but they've been wrestling with their tech for a decade: molten antimony is STUPID.)

These guys have actual customers and their website has actual numbers for products you could buy today: prices, capacity, charge/discharge rate, weight, efficiency, etc. They're building factories in spain and australia.

@cstross @robryk Ambri set the space back years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sddb0Khx0yA was _exciting_ back in 2012 but it didn't WORK. (Ivory tower academic white guy behind it, of course.)

The moten metal ate through the seals (https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ambri-returns-to-the-energy-storage-hunt-with-liquid-metal-battery-redesign) and he KEEPS FUNDRAISING https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/ambris-liquid-metal-battery-mines-144-million-in-storage-investment-gold-rush and just... please stop. Get out of the way of the people who have stuff that actually works.

@cstross @robryk And I had ESS confused with Form Energy for about a year myself (http://landley.net/notes-2022.html#17-04-2022) which is another company that seems to soak up funding, advertise extensively, but never actually ship anything to customers.

ESS has real working things deployed in the field that people have paid them money for, and their limiting factor isn't research but building factories. As George Carlin said, "kinda helps the belief along".

@robryk @cstross It's not an electrode it's a membrane? I've seen explanations of this but it was a while ago and there is COVID between here and there. It could have been in https://youtu.be/xCzKQbukL1E or https://youtu.be/qhtAiIMkmJY or one of https://resources.essinc.com/white-papers or...

I believe the metal completely dissolving into solution each cycle is part of the expected operation? It doesn't have the lead/acid problem of too much discharge being bad for it.

@robryk @cstross I also vaguely recall that the iron being in solution is the charged state, not the discharged state? But don't quote me on that, I'm sure it's written down somewhere.

The basic technology was developed by NASA in the 1970s and is all out of patent. It was uninteresting because it's really big and heavy, and at least back then its round trip efficiency was only 75%...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_redox_flow_battery

I'm not a domain expert here, I can just point at sources....

@FeralRobots @cstross Oh sure. But those things get stacked 8-9 high in the wild and even three high triples the storage density.

Googling for numbers, a 40' container is allowed to weigh 20K kg and be street legal, the internal volume is just under 68 cubic meters, so about 2/7 of its internal volume could be water and it's normal weight.

As solvable versus unsolvable problems go, that one I'm not worried about. I'm also not at all surprised they're saving it for later.

@edavies @cstross Oh goddess no.

Hydrogen leaks through everything, has a round trip efficiency below 50%, destroys the ozone layer, needs dangerously high pressure to have ANY energy density, embrittlement...

https://youtu.be/f7MzFfuNOtY
https://youtu.be/b88v-WvqzeQ
https://youtu.be/2EA4tDYwNYo
https://youtu.be/zSeTHOCHryc
https://youtu.be/ge4ux1Y1ric
https://youtu.be/MgmBkvrO0Dg

Maybe international airplane travel will use it... but even there biodiesel seems more likely?

@gaya_tech @cstross You're surprised a magazine used clip art for molecule graphics?

@bascule He was not born in this country and would thus require a constitutional amendment to run for president.

@antoinevg @bascule They needed the Boomers to pull that off. Too many of them have died already.

@cstross @edavies @markrvickers You probably don't even need to get that fancy. Vegetable oil, kerosene, diesel, and jet fuel are all reasonably interchangeable. In theory we can let 4 billion years of evolution handle the synthesis for us.

We can't produce enough to replace trucking fuel, and food crops aren't efficient feedstock, but for the "lithium ain't dense enough" niche it's an option that doesn't require significant new discoveries. We KNOW farming.

@bascule you said pathological narcissist who wants a title.

@0xabad1dea Will render it like... and then there was nothing until your sentence about being unsure it was supported.

@ginnyhogan Scam Bankrupt Fraud.

@edavies @cstross Good luck with your religion.

@ahribellah@peoplemaking.games @eniko I go ahead and link to it and treat it as if it's a quote tweet. The plumbing sucking at it is a separate issue.

@freemin7@mast.hpc.social Yup.

@freemin7@mast.hpc.social I sent him the link to your post. I don't think he's on here yet but I've been poking him...

@fade popehat, pwnallthethings, swiftonsecurity...

@Are0h So you need to pre-judge people then?

@choochoobear Popeye explained https://mastodon.lol/@dulcedemon/109554851225936731

@apiratemoo I find https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/index.html easiest to navigate.

@apiratemoo I'm trying to make http://landley.net/toybox/help.html useful but it's terse by nature. More a cheat sheet than man pages.

@apiratemoo Sigh
And I see I need to teach the generator about aliases so it doesn't dump a half dozen redundant instances of the still unfinished shell stuff...

@miss_s_b Efficiency and resiliency trade off. Increasing efficiency usually decreases resilience by eliminating spare capacity.

@shreyas "git format-patch -1 $HASH" and then email the file to the maintainer or mailing list. (Apply with "git am filename")

@shreyas Note that for historical reasons the Linux kernel mailing list does not want the file to be attached, it wants it cut and pasted inline with word wrap disabled, and that whole signed-off-by-in-triplicate nonsense.

Every other mailing list I'm aware of is okay with file attachments.

@futurebird@sauropods.win @barometz "What are people talking about?" + "Some people are terrible." is a hard conflict to resolve.

Google replaced its original pagerank algorithm with something more complicated and opaque because SEO spammers gamed it so hard. The YouTube algorithm has been a clusterfuck ever since shoving Google+ down its throat shattered its original commenter community.

An established community self policing is a double-edged sword. Externally imposed "benevolent dictator" has more edges.

@XanIndigo It's like "consumer". Capitalism wants you to self-identify as capitalist the same way other religions want you to build your identity around first communion and being a parishioner.

@SexyCyborg you're posting stuff directly here and then we are also getting copies of what you post to Twitter, resulting in duplicates.

@hakan_geijer @cstross @jbgi some of us switched from copyleft to public domain equivalent licensing a decade back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=15m09s

https://archive.org/download/OhioLinuxfest2013/24-Rob_Landley-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.mp3

@gsuberland @esther@strangeobject.space how do you remove results from a hashtag?

@Tiggersong @fade Multi-time agility champion. Here's 2019 https://youtu.be/GhKmykc02Bw and 2021
https://youtu.be/MS6LnSbnEFI

Happy dog.

@miss_s_b @cstross @CherylMorgan It's catchy too. Good walking music.

https://youtu.be/S-FT3W-rXsA

@Popehat The people I follow use it almost entirely as the old livejournal-cut. A short intro for a long post.

The problem with content warnings is they're incoming, not outgoing. I follow someone who is deathly allergic to mangoes (carries an epi-pen and had to use it once because of the smell of mango sauce) who is uncomfortable seeing them, but does not expect CW: mango. Childhood trauma left me with needle phobia and I don't expect CW: syringe. I would LOVE a CW hiding Trump or Musk's face.

Pipes froze again.

The insulation we had a guy install around the water pipe going into the house last time Austin froze over is (so far) preventing the heating pad and blanket from thawing it this time.

Reporters interviewing each other about their experience with Mastodon. https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/can-mastodon-be-a-reasonable-twitter-substitute-for-journalists/

@Popehat Here are some professional journalists talking about mastodon's content warning mechanism and their own debates about it: https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/can-mastodon-be-a-reasonable-twitter-substitute-for-journalists/#:~:text=content%20warnings

@bhawthorne @bethsawin @catvalente @sdague Malls were de-facto public spaces for a while. Then their owners got greedy and they all went bankrupt.

And thawed.

(Yes we could have waved a blowtorch or something at the frozen bit, but gentle warming with a heating pad under a military surplus sleeping bag is better for the lifespan of the pipes. Replacing them would involve tearing open the wall _and_ jackhammering up concrete, let's not.)

@malwaretech https://twitter.com/justinpie/status/1575514491009216512

@lrhodes Boomers who inhaled leaded gasoline exhaust fumes for 50 years, including significant pediatric exposure, got very bad at dealing with change as they aged (they temselves said "don't trust anyone over 30") and went completely mental as real age related mental degeration set in a decade ago.

It's more widespread and intense than other generations because the pediatric/developmental lead exposure was so severe in Boomers.

@jomc Instantly fatal?

"But," he said, "you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live." - Exodus 33:20.

Indiana Jones was right.

@pleia2 you know the backstory about how IBM got into Linux, right?

They put out a "beta" of DB2 for Linux, thinking it might be of interest to the educational market, and started getting support requests from large banks.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000823050523/http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,383856,00.html

When the Boomers die, intellectual property law needs to end with them. https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/109563859159777518

@pluralistic I'm told Fiddler on the Roof is an old movie about migrating off Twitter.

Russia is widely expected to collapse into civil war when Putin finally dies, in part because he's eliminated all potential successors:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT4sK36cU3Y

Putin invaded crimea to distract from the Sochi Olympics imploding, a vietnam-style quagmire putting a timer on his tenure. (He doubled down like Johnson.)
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/politics/2014/02/sochi-olympics-russia-corruption

But it looks like the civil war's already started, with all the guns handed out in Ukraine smuggled back home and sold to criminals:
https://twitter.com/betelgeuse1922/status/1606251954979618816

1) Right wing loons are pearl clutching about global decline in birth rate.

2) Ronald Reagan's Racist Rant about "welfare queens" having lots of babies because of federal subsidies for baby-having meant official GOP position was "giving money to mothers increases baby-having".

3) Biden's $300/month per-child payment during the pandemic was bigly effective.

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/27/1075299510/the-expanded-child-tax-credit-briefly-slashed-child-poverty-heres-what-else-it-d

So of course:

4) Republicans unanimously voted against it, and it wasa not extended.

When the Boomers die, UBI.

@anildash @jab01701mid @taylorlorenz The word "journalist" was probably optional in that sentence. I await a fork of the software, maintained by someone less condescending to the entire userbase.

Listening to Fuzzy and @fade open their "my little pony" themed apple juice bottle. The stopper is a capsule you open, with a little pony figurine inside.

It's Rarity again. They called it before they even opened it. They have six of her now. No more than two of any others, but so many Rarity...

@gwensnyder The Mastodon maintainer is a comfortable white male saying "you don't really want that, you don't know what you want, I know better, let me tell you about your own needs, I don't care how many times I have to repeat this".

That's a strong sign the project needs a fork (or fresh implementation) maintained by somebody else. Market opportunity you could drive a truck through.

If he's like this about quote tweets, it won't be the last time.

@laser Twitter auto tagged me as female. I let them continue in that belief.

@malwaretech I unfollowed a bunch of people cause I didn't want to see what they posted.

@malwaretech Nothing to do with quote tweets, plenty of links out on the web to be horrified about.

@seananmcguire Not in my experience?

@annaleen George Zimmerman did not consent to going viral.

@moof @cstross @jwz @neilhimself And before that Arthur C Clark's "9 Billion Names of God" in 1953...

@saint_rebel_ukraine_ I liked https://twitter.com/uamemesforces/status/1606701325177262082 but can't find them on mastodon yet...

@Patienceltd @aprilfollies @moof @cstross @jwz @neilhimself In the french RPG Steve Jackson's "In Nomine" was based on, a demon of technology uploaded himself to the internet... and the recipient immediately shared him on bittorrent so hell couldn't get him back out because there's always someone invoking him online.

@markhertling "Can I convince you to fight back less, at least for a while."

The real life japanese news stories behind each Persona 5 villain.

https://youtu.be/kgf_XY3Q5mQ

@vaurorapub I made @fade a cup holder by drilling four holes in a plastic cup, running twine through them, and looping it over the shower curtain rod.

This allows a range of shower beverages.

Sigh. Quote posts are edging towards attaching screenshots without even bothering to link to the original.

https://mastodon.social/@kerileighmerritt/109577253570783336

https://infosec.exchange/@wendynather/109577029835326187

This is the future the mastodon maintainer wants...

@adrienne Hello. Still in canada with person you moved to canada for?

@adrienne I didn't expect the technical part to be hard, it's just that grognard insists "his" users can't have what they want for their own good, and will somehow all thank him for it someday, you'll see, etc.

How hard is the fork for other admins to install?

@freemin7@mast.hpc.social @bcantrill I have yet to see anyone who is not a white man express this position. And I've been waiting for a month and a half.

@freemin7@mast.hpc.social I linked to two women doing it despite grognard's prohibition, and a white man linked to another white man in support of the original white man's prohibition of it.

Here's a conversation I just had with a woman I've known since 1998 (we met at Armadillocon) about the instance she's on implementing support for it: https://social.treehouse.systems/@adrienne/109578704728551626

@freemin7@mast.hpc.social I believe one of the women I linked to initially has been a professional programmer longer than I've been an _amateur_ programmer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendynather

@freemin7@mast.hpc.social https://mstdn.social/@danielhanley/109569763543559036

@freemin7@mast.hpc.social informing the recipient of the link, making it stop showing if they delete the link, ensuring that you're not accidentally publicizing content from a locked account that way...

@freemin7@mast.hpc.social Oh and making sure you can't just post a fake expansion of something they never said pointing to a URL that never existed and claim "the must have deleted it" when viewers can't click through to your forgery, that's nice too...

There's lists of these. I think Rich was collecting them? I expect Adrienne's instance has implemented them.

Grognard already said he never will, so there are plugins that attach a screenshot with a link.

@freemin7@mast.hpc.social Somebody mentioned the plugin they were using had just updated to rewrite links to other mastodon instances to be local links on your curent instance (as if you put the URL in the search bar) so clicking through lets you favorite and reply without the login pop-up, but I didn't save it because I don't use that one and want it supported in my instance. (Which means running a non-grognard fork like treehouse does.)

@freemin7@mast.hpc.social Darn it, what's it called when someone finds additional reasons for something they've already decided, none of which were motivation for them doing it in the first place?

It's related to "his conclusions never change but he has a different justification for it every time the previous one gets shot down", ala George W. Bush invading Iraq.

You'd think it would be on one of the https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/fallacies_list.html lists but I guess it's adjacent...

@catvalente As creepy as Amazon is, this is why the amazon wishlist was created. (A bridal registry without needing to get married...)

@freemin7@mast.hpc.social That sounds right, yes. Thanks. (Knew there was a phrase for it. :)

@SwiftOnSecurity

https://www.riotrogers.com/propcostume/grittney

@oldrawgabbit What's that old parable, it is easier to pass a rich white man through the eye of a needle than send them to prison?

A blender and syringe help.

Don't pick an unprovoked fight with a lawyer. The good ones know where all the levers of power really are, and how to turn them.

https://kettner.social/@jordankettner/109561098940831930

@robryk @freemin7@mast.hpc.social I can include a dead link to anywhere, yes. But if my instance doesn't expand that dead link into a forged post, then my instance isn't implicitly attesting to the validity of a snapshot in time of what the post said. (Back on the bird site a summary card and inline tweet data were distinct and distinguishable.)

Activepub is eventually going to need cryptographic signatures if it doesn't already have them. Shouldn't be noticeably more heavyweight than https...

Not that this is a new development, but it seems to be becoming more common. https://mas.to/@carnage4life/109565771932814923

@ariadne Sigh.

The Wizard of Oz was isekai. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe was isekai. Gulliver's travels. Dante's inferno. A Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's court. Ovid writing about Orpheus trying to rescue Euridice.

Andre Norton's Which World in 1963 started with an american going through the Siege Perilous. Roger Zelezny's Nine Princes in Amber (1970) was multiverse Isekai, as was Robert Aspirin's Another Fine Myth in 1978. Alan Moore named Marvel's Earth-616 in 1983.

@sarahtaber The premise of Doctor Who is that an advanced long-lived alien species created a time traveling RV you could park in deep space for years to catch up on stuff, and then return home 5 minutes after you left and pick up where you left off.

The Doctor took one to another planet and interacted with others, and his people insisted he was using it wrong.

@cstross It should have been another September that never ended but Twittler never ships on time.

@SexyCyborg The USA is also waiting for the Boomers to die.

@molly0xfff Chevron vs Donziger. The fix is in then.

The problem with Copaganda: https://elliottkay.tumblr.com/post/703567320532074496/theoutcastrogue-copaganda-does-three-main-things

@SexyCyborg Fascists love STEM because it's amoral. Nazi science was no threat to the German regime, and when the USA and Russia captured the V2 engineers and used them for our space programs, they worked just as hard for each side of the Iron Curtain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

Fascists are eliminating everything ELSE because educating people on history, sociology, literature, etc directly undermines fascism.

@Patienceltd @aprilfollies @moof @cstross @jwz @neilhimself Speaking of SJG's In Nomine, the first supplement (Relevations I: Night Music) had a sample adventure "The Demon Prince of Rock and Roll" where a demon who was offered a boon by Lucifer had paniced and asked if he could come back later. So Lucifer gave him a song to summon him... by singing it 10 million times.

The adventure is about trying to stop ANOTHER demon who learned the song giving a live performance of it on MTV.

@wa7iut @SexyCyborg That statement is a can of worms that I'm not going to try to follow up on from my phone, but... great is not how I'd describe it

@wa7iut @SexyCyborg Let's just say they put a lot of effort into it.

Russia is having its agents attack the power grids of its enemies. If they won't pay for Russian oil and gas, they will live in the dark.

https://newsie.social/@toussaint/109582082326007250

@rubenbolling you don't escape capitalist embrace-and-extend by moving to another proprietary platform ready to be purchased.

Russia's Matroyshka dolls started out as a copy of Japan's Shichi-fuku-jin dolls nesting the seven gods of fortune.

The Russian copy was shown at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, from where it became famous.

https://en.japantravel.com/kanagawa/history-of-the-russian-matryoshka/31720

@fishkin Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal in 2007.

@catvalente You can go to the "following" tabs of people to see if you recognize anybody. Mine's https://mstdn.jp/users/landley/following for example where @scalzi @seananmcguire @HowardTayler @neilhimself @KBSpangler @ursulav @dianeduane @ArkadyMartine may be familiar from the convention circuit...

Increasing efficiency reduces resiliency. "Just in time delivery" increases efficiency until it's brittle. A thread on how Southwest Airlines just shattered.

https://defcon.social/@tprophet/109589012113564475

@jpkmensah@mas.to Any time a field gets lucrative, men push out women. Here's the famous 1983 MIT paper on that purge happening in computer science: https://simson.net/ref/1983/barriers.pdf

(See also @sarahtaber 's thread on "egg money" and https://mastodon.social/@Sheril/109545727584656667 for "beer brewer" becoming "witch".)

@BrynnTannehill74 who are you following?

@mikey @BrynnTannehill74 Some people private that. (There's a setting for it.)

@BrynnTannehill74 He privated his followers. You can do that here. Some people do. I haven't.

@cstross "So what was your parents' total bill for raising you, with interest and adjusted for inflation, and how long did it take you to pay it off?"

Then again it does explain why so many libertarians are spherical. And frictionless.

@SexyCyborg Don't underestimate the impact 50 years of breathing leaded gasoline fumes had on the boomers worldwide.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/lead-gasoline-blunted-iq-half-us-population-study-rcna19028

Pediatric and chronic lead exposure combines badly with senility. The debuffs don't just stack, they multiply.

@oldrawgabbit It's called shrinkflation.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/21/brexit-shrinkflation-ons-pack-sizes

Next May 4 remind me to glue two hexagons to opposite sides of a can of thai iced tea

@TheRaDR The NYT is for and about Boomers only.

@pixelfed You're not providing any context either.

@boud @EarthCog@mas.to @mmasnick @dansup Ah, trademarks. Yeah, hipstergram's lawyers gotta freak because they can't publicly NOT once invoked. US IP law's nuts. Sad all around...

@trevor @tinker To add alt text in an edit, delete the image and re-add it.

@cstross I always assumed Mr Blobby, Barney, and Teletubbies were regional variations of the species.

@boud @EarthCog@mas.to @mmasnick @dansup Yeah, that's literally what trademark is _for_. Open source don't enter into it, as the dead parrot sketch said. (Firefox went through this cycle if I recall...)

@shepgo Need to trim the /a/ from the end?

@caseynewton "He has also asked some leaders to snuff out the sources of leaks to the press and anonymous posts on social media sites, three people said."

@bookishbrews s/we/Boomers/

Forty years of breathing leaded gasoline fumes combine poorly with senility.

@Quinnae_Moon @dalias An argument _against_ stay-and-fight on twitter to use the Ring against Sauron then.

Grognard insisting the mastodon community is nicer because it doesn't have quote tweets is like a religion insisting its members are nicer because of the dietary restrictions.

@dalias I should add something stuff to main.c in toybox that violates that fucking stupid compiler flag.

"What broke?" "My special lint flag generated a false positive!" "But what actually happened?" "The static checker complained!" "Do you have an example of a supported system on which it doesn't work?" "Not with this flag!" Which does nothing but insert an error message...

I'm disappointed in GenX but most of us spent our first 25 years breathing leaded gasoline fumes too. The brain damage comes out with age...

https://fosstodon.org/@gebi/109602046892170518

@aris @dalias Then define it already.