@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

duncan_bayne

@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch

I'm a Melbourne-based husband, father of three, and principal engineer / engineering director. I live amongst the trees out in Belgrave; you can find me online at:

🚀 Gemini: gemini://duncan.bayne.id.au/
🦣 Mastodon: https://emacs.ch/
🌐 Web: https://duncan.bayne.id.au/
◯ sourcehut: https://git.sr.ht/~duncan-bayne/
🤢 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/duncan-bayne/

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

agreenberg, to random

We fully expect to receive a takedown demand for this story. We also think the stakes of this anti-censorship battle are too high not to publish it anyway.

https://www.wired.com/story/appin-training-centers-lawsuits-censorship/

duncan_bayne,
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

@agreenberg The power of the Streisand Effect 😜​

(Relatedly: it strikes me as amusing that most people I know can't name a single Streisand song, but do know about the Streisand Effect ...)

kcarruthers, (edited ) to random
@kcarruthers@mastodon.social avatar

I’ve been re-reading all my history books about the Nazis. One thing that strikes me is how hard it was to fight back against Nazism from inside. The normative culture is so strong and everybody is just going along. Ordinary folks, with denouncing their neighbours to the Gestapo. The Gestapo was tiny only 32k. It was the ordinary people that were informing on their neighbours. Ordinary people enabled Nazism.

duncan_bayne,
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

@kcarruthers Solzhenitsyn put it well:

"“At what exact point, then should one resist the communists? ... How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: what would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if during periods of mass arrests people had simply not sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. ... The Organs [police] would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers ... and notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.”

janl, to random
@janl@narrativ.es avatar

Well, officially in the market for a Slack replacement now. Hit me. What are you personally happy with in a small business setting, strong macOS/iOS support, user friendly, including nontechnical folks?

duncan_bayne,
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

@janl Negligible, especially when done well :) The work server is nicely managed through CloudFormation; my personal one is just docker images on an EC2 image that I manually upgrade.

Main things were:

(a) configuring it to store files in an S3 bucket that can be backed up, and

(b) running a cron job to take daily backups of the database

duncan_bayne,
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

@janl I use Mattermost; I self-host for personal use, and we also have a Mattermost server at $DAY_JOB for staff, editors, and contributors. Works very well.

duncan_bayne,
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

@janl Ooh, speaking of which, this might be a good starting point:

https://github.com/DanielHeath/mattermost-aws

Quinnypig, to random
@Quinnypig@awscommunity.social avatar

Either Google Cloud has done something next-level horrifying, or this superannuation company is being highly misleading about their own mistake.

Bets?

https://www.unisuper.com.au/contact-us/outage-update

duncan_bayne,
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

@Quinnypig The local rumour mill has it that they nuked all their GCP resources with Terraform. My bet is that if true they next try to blame the tooling.

GossiTheDog, to random
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social avatar

Microsoft are getting mauled on Insta for this advert, and rightly so.

https://www.instagram.com/microsoft365/p/C7j8ipnxIiI/

duncan_bayne,
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

@GossiTheDog Sent this to a close friend whose startup is actually trying to fix fucked meeting cultures. Said Microsoft is now doing presales for him.

simon_brooke, to random
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

I'm going to have to replace my eight year old MacBook; it's beyond the point I can afford to keep repairing it. I really want the next one to be the last laptop I ever buy: we cannot afford to keep generating e-waste.

My current thought is a @frameworkcomputer, mainly for repairability. Does anyone have alternative suggestions for a very long life laptop? Low power consumption is also desirable, UN*X/Linux of some kind required.

duncan_bayne,
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

@simon_brooke @frameworkcomputer Yup, especially when gaming. I'm hoping that subsequent updates will help.

duncan_bayne,
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

@simon_brooke @frameworkcomputer We just bought a Framework 13 Ryzen for my wife to use as a Linux Mint daily driver.

It's a great system, and I'm very tempted to abandon my usual plan of refurbished ThinkPads when it's time to replace my W540.

duncan_bayne, to random
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

Years ago I wrote a text adventure (a.k.a. interactive fiction), called Witching Isle 1. I intended to follow up with at least one sequel but it hasn't happened yet.

Anyhow, you can now play it online, here:

https://iplayif.com/?story=https%3A%2F%2Fwitching-isle.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com%2Fwitching.z5

Source code (it's written in Inform) is here:

https://git.sr.ht/~duncan-bayne/witchingisle1/

tuxdevices, (edited ) to apple German
@tuxdevices@fosstodon.org avatar

I just received my new work laptop (#Apple #Macbook Pro M3, ~€2000) just to discover that it does not support dual-monitor output despite having multiple video ports.

For a feature that even the cheapest laptops (and older MacBooks) have had for years, Apple now asks you to buy the MacBook Pro M3 Pro (€2500) or M3 Max (€4000).

This is essentially €2000 #ewaste. Not so "pro" after all.

duncan_bayne,
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

@tuxdevices Remember this has been in Apple's DNA since the first time Jobs took over.

https://www.folklore.org/Diagnostic_Port.html

"But once again, Steve Jobs objected, because he didn't like the idea of customers mucking with the innards of their computer. He would also rather have them buy a new 512K Mac instead of them buying more RAM from a third-party."

Why hackers buy Apple kit (since the Apple II) I do not understand.

duncan_bayne, to random
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

TIL that there's a cafe nearby called JavaScript Cafe 🤣

aldi80s, to Vintage
@aldi80s@mastodon.social avatar

Pioneer P-D1
Compact Disc player, 1984.

I really love the style. 40 years later and it still looks super modern.

duncan_bayne,
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

@aldi80s Better than modern! The labels are all legible and the buttons are clearly buttons.

duncan_bayne, to random
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

Over the weekend, I installed a local LLM to play around with Emacs integration and suchlike. (Related: if you haven't tried Emacs in a decade or two I can wholeheartedly recommend it. Ligatures, LSP integration, LLM integration, ...)

Anyways right off the bat the LLM hallucinated what is now my favourite non-existent HTTP response:

400 KO

🤣

duncan_bayne, to random
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

Many open source projects keep using Discord, when Discord is known for banning open source client implementations.

Why do projects keep supporting a platform that is explicitly hostile towards the philosophy underpinning their projects? It baffles me.

duncan_bayne, to random
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

Okay anyone know what this is about?

My suburb, Belgave, has just sprouted a few temporary installations of traffic monitoring cameras (photo attached of the control unit).

No-one I've spoken to at the Yarra Ranges Council or VicRoads knows what they are. I've emailed VGSO (at VicRoads' suggestion) and NTSurveys, because the latter's phone just goes to voicemail.

I'm very curious to know what data are being recorded, and how the data are being handled.

duncan_bayne,
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

@PCOWandre @decryption @ozjonty I went back to take a look inside but it's fitted with high end physical security.

That is, a single black zip tie on one corner.

May have another poke around if I don't hear back from the owners sometime soon.

duncan_bayne, to random
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

💥 - haven't had a cap explode like this in years. (Two year old Meross smart plug from a pack of four - the remaining three are all working fine for the time being).

decryption, to random
@decryption@aus.social avatar

telstra 1 hour ago "we will call you back in 30 minutes with an unlock code"

duncan_bayne,
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

@decryption I'd love to know what the plan is here ... they're already understaffed to support existing customers. Death spiral?

decryption, to random
@decryption@aus.social avatar

My main beef with the Pixel 8a is that it's a slippery fucker. Did nobody at Google hold this phone in their hands??

duncan_bayne,
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

@decryption All our Pixels - kids have 2s, I have a 4 - are in rugged cases partly for that reason.

It shits me that none of the major manufacturers make any effort to ruggedize their phones. Almost like they make money off repairs or something ...

duncan_bayne, to random
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

Non-Americans give the US a lot of shit over a lot of things, only some of it deserved. I know, I'm Australian, and we do it all the time 😁

But I really hope all the Americans here really, deeply, grok the significance of the verdict in the Trump case.

Much more important than any specifics of the case, or the involvement of Trump himself: an American court handed down 34 felony convictions to an ex-President.

In how many other countries would this happen? Can you imagine Putin, or Jinping, or Erdogan, in a similar situation?

You did well, and should be proud to be American.

duncan_bayne, to random
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

https://x.com/Nikos_17/status/1794641890769252720

The one good thing about the promised draft is that there is zero chance it'll come to pass, because it would require the Tories to win.

duncan_bayne, to random
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

Sorry kids, no eggs for breakfast tomorrow unless she moves first.

duncan_bayne, to random
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

From the AWS CloudFormation docs ...

"Fn::If": [condition_name, value_if_true, value_if_false]

Or, as Greenspun put it,

"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of CommonLisp."

duncan_bayne,
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

@holgerschurig The point I was trying to make was just that it's frustrating to use tools that clearly aren't ideal for the job at hand. Specifically, conditional statements in JSON (or YAML for that matter). At the point you need that, you really should be offering an actual language rather than a serialisation format. May be time to consider migration to CDK.

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