Dear computer friends - as information workers on strike at #UAW4811, im trying to think of some digital picketing strategies. Ways of incurring additional costs and disruptions to operation that are within the bounds of the law. One of the biggest levers we have is grading, and UCLA uses a fork (?) of Canvas (bruinlearn). Does anyone have any bright ideas for how to run up a cloud bill? Something along the lines of uploading enormous files to course pages, asking students to download a directory with millions of files as a .zip, that kinda thing. Something thats an arms length shy of CFAA but something that could let our students and remote colleagues help with the strike. Any ideas? Boosts welcome. (I do not speak for or represent UAW 4811 in any way as a rank and file member)
Edit: dm me for my signal if you are curious about such a topic and are not necessarily volunteering any information in the affirmative or negative
@jonny It depends on how their install is configured. Storage usually isn't that expensive and neither is networking. However, large numbers of instances running are. Thousands of simultaneous logins might do the trick.
@jonny Generally apps are scaled to handle average load, and the thing that has broken apps since time immemorial is sudden simultaneous use of by lots of users.
People advise one not to use Chrome -- I don't -- but they also advise to use Firefox, instead -- I do -- but for the record, it is not clear to me that any of these browsers can be trusted.
It feels more like Chrome is just a chapter ahead, and the others will soon catch up.
It's never going to be a pure experience, but I find that Firefox with Privacy Badger installed and a generous use of account containers to segment your life a little bit is at least considerably better than many of the alternatives.
It's an ongoing frustration for me that federation is seen as the end goal, instead of something that opens other possibilities for improvement.
Federation could be a really good first step, but we need to follow it up with assemblages of federated instances that collectively make agreements on rules and norms that provide safety.
@amcasari I saw Bernie in a Columbia SC hotel getting breakfast from the hot bar. Apparently the staff said he was a dick to them. But it was still low key.
Code drunk, debug sober. Bah! Just fixed three bugs after a pint of Tundra.
(This is in no way meant to be role model behaviour. There just happens to be a lovely pub by the seashore in Bray where you can sit outside and it’s a nice distraction in the evenings when the weather is good and I don’t feel I’ve done enough in the day* and need a change of scene.)
It doesn’t help that I never think I’ve done enough in the day. 🤷♂️
I was trying out different Linux desktop options in the mid-90s, thinking, yeah, this just needs a few tweaks, but in a few years this'll be everywhere . . .
And TBF the cores of open source OSes are everywhere, they're just called ChromeOS, iOS, Android, and MacOS.
Not linking directly because I don't want to shit on projects I believe are genuinely trying to make the web better, but every time I see a post about "the small web" or a more "humane" web or whatever that includes phrases like this about content: "created without the motivation of financial gain" I sigh so deeply lol
I am begging ethical web enthusiasts to understand what an extreme privilege it is to spend time working on something without worrying about money
@sue I absolutely see where you are coming from on this, but some of the web that the nostalgia threads are talking about refers to a time when the software on the Internet was produced by people being paid By government or private grants in aid of research.
@sue I fully realize that version of the web necessarily served far smaller population, but I don’t think it’s wrong to want to the money that underlies the production, care, and feeding of the web to not come from defense contracts, privacy invasions, and pyramid schemes.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want state funding mixed with cooperative sources to create at least a larger corner of the web that is apart from all of that.
FWIW I had to look it up but they tried and it failed because of the filibuster. They can't change the rules without 51 votes and that means the SineManchins can't just be out of town, but have to agree.
#ClimateDiary Anyone else struggling to see any prospects for turning things around? I will keep on trying to do what I can. Of course. But 2024 is challenging.
Last year did a post about how I wasn’t motivated by hope but by #DesperateDetermination. I now realise i got that wrong. Hope isn’t just fluffy “things will be alright”. Hope is some flicker of belief that you and others can change things; I did, actually, have “hope”. Less now, but will keep going.
I have been saying "hope is both irrational and necessary" for several years now, but I will say that I was despairing for about a decade that we weren't taking the first steps that we had to in order to get the snowballing sociotechnical change that would stop.
The last few years we've finally started taking those steps. I don't know if we'll keep going or if it's too late. But I'm at least encouraged that that's happened.
@futurebird@irizoris I don't know of any rigorous work on it, but I assume the basic eco-evolutionary theory on why the broods come out so rarely and in such numbers is the same as trees masting—that the sheer abundance of a prey species all at once and not that often just overwhelms the predator ability to consume, so that even though it's a feeding bonanza more cicadas get to mate and reproduce than get eaten?