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owen

@owen@mastodon.transneptune.net

Turnaround time on interesting suggestions/questions: between 2d and 2y.

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owen, to random
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You ever think about how Google de-spined - destroyed - literal tonnes of books donated by university libraries, with the intention of scanning them into a digital free library, and how none of that ever materialized?

Those books are just gone now, instead.

owen, to random
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Something to keep in mind when hearing about hydrogen as a renewable or green fuel is that nearly half of hydrogen production, worldwide, comes from natural gas. Another 45% or so come from coal and oil sources. Renewable hydrogen - electrolysis, generally - is basically a blip.

Hydrogen is, in many cases, an attempt by the fossil fuels industry to carry on business as usual in the face of carbon-reduction initiatives by putting the carbonaceous parts out of sight.

owen, to random
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Annual reminder that your kids are a lot more likely to be hit by a car while trick-or-treating than they are to be poisoned by halloween candy.

Nobody likes your kids enough to give them free drugs, but plenty of people like driving enough to give them a free high-body impact from a two-ton machine.

owen, to random
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I don't suppose any of y'all are hiring, are you? I've been on my ass since February when my last lot did a big downsize, and I'm bored. Skillsets include a bunch of ops knowledge around both on-prem and cloud infrastructure, software development in just about any language you can name (prefs for not Ruby, would do Python, would do Go but not very happily, would dearly love to be doing Rust), and perf management/coaching.

owen, to random
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This meeting could have been foretold in prophecy.

owen, to random
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And you may tell yourself, "This is not my rough beast."
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my hour, come at last."

owen, to random
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Symptom: Dishwasher rack does not roll fully back into the dishwasher.

Diagnosis: An object has fallen behind the rack and is in the way.

Resolution: Remove cat from dishwasher.

owen, to random
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Does anyone on this webbed site remember pre-AltaVista-era library search computers and their interfaces? If you do, do you know the names of any of the software packages that provided those catalogues?

owen, to random
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Congratulations to Tumblr's userbase for setting an absolutely eye-watering amount of venture money on fire.

I mean that. You never had any obligation to return value to the investors, and so you didn't. And when the company hosting you made bad choices, you punished them for it.

owen, to random
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Stress-testing my new Yubikey.

owen, to random
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If you need help understanding Canada's apparently-contradictory statements and actions on domestic and foreign economic affairs, look no further than the OEC's exports breakdown (https://oec.world/en/profile/country/can).

Canada is a petrostate that has, just barely, the decency to be embarassed about it.

owen, to random
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Actually pretty disappointed with Steve Klabnik's excellent technical writeup of what makes ATproto tick, because he fell into the trap of thinking that moderation is only about what you see on your screen, and not about how the service facilitates or discourages communication more generally.

owen,
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A substantial amount of community harm mediated by social software starts from the problem of enabling hostile actors to communicate with each other. It does someone no good to block out, say, anti-trans messaging, if the service they're using is enabling transphobes to coordinate with each other.

owen, to random
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American social media companies will swear up and down that they could not do business if it weren't for s. 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The briefest of looks at those selfsame companies' activities in parts of the world with no equivalent legislation - Canada, most of Europe, and many developing markets - will reveal this to be a lie.

owen, to random
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Some questions on moderation, to help illustrate why delegating it to the end user is not effective:

  • How does your moderation strategy deal with a child abuser helping someone else hide their own child abuse?

  • How does your moderation strategy deal with groups of people communicating to plan crimes together?

  • How does your moderation strategy deal with situations where someone is being harassed in ways that are illegible to you as an operator?

owen, to random
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So who is the @bretdevereaux of:

  • Metallurgy
  • Fashion and sumptuary systems
  • How cities grow
owen, to random
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Whipped off "execs get raises on potential, line employees get raises on performance" earlier without really thinking through what I was saying and now I have to sit with that thought for a while

owen, to random
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Close Slack. Reject or cancel meeting invites. Set up an autoresponder. Let people know you're going to be unavailable, and don't engage with their feelings about that fact.

Go and do the things you've been putting off. Nobody's going to give you your time back unless you take it.

owen, to random
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I absolutely do not want to read a machine-generated report on what my coworkers tried to tell me, thanks. Whatever they wanted to say is important enough - at least to them - that it's worth hearing in the original language and not through a layer of statistical deadening.

owen, to random
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The actual fuck if IBM acquires Hashicorp is that so much of Hashicorp's value as a maker of development tooling is tied up in free contributions. Some of those are from large organizations who made a considered decision to support Hashicorp (eg. Amazon, who write their own providers for Packer and Terraform), but many are from individual devs or small shops who are just trying to get their own jobs done.

None of those people will see any compensation for the value they added to this deal.

owen,
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I want to support my peers, and none of the people who benefit when I do those things are my peers.

owen,
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One of the reasons I pulled out of doing open source infrastructure development, scrubbed my Github profile, and otherwise dropped out of Free Public Software Development is that I am bone tired of giving free labour to these fucks.

owen, to random
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If you want a kinder world - one with fewer scams, less violence, and so on - then put your energy into making sure that everyone has food to eat, a table to eat it on, and a safe way out of relationships that turn bad.

Everyone. Really.

owen, to random
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What do you even mean by "searching the web," anyways?

owen,
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With public for-profit search on the internet breaking down badly - and with Google, Bing, DDG, and their also-ran peers breaking down particularly badly in the direction of "here's a thing you can buy" - I think the time is actually ripe for a discussion of what we, as users, want out of search, and more generally how we want to find information on the internet.

owen, to random
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I think we'll likely be a decade or two reckoning with the consequences that businesses were largely sold on "devops" as a way to cut headcount.

owen,
@owen@mastodon.transneptune.net avatar

Unfortunately, deciding that it's no longer someone's job to do operational work, such as capacity planning or continuity management, does not relieve the consequences when those tasks are ignored or done badly.

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