Furries: "UGH we're such horrible people we ruin everything there was a fire at FWA and obviously furries set it and that means we're just as bad as Rainfurrest and no one will ever want us again!"
1 - the fire was a grease fire that burned through the kitchen wall of the Sear hotel restaurant.
2 - that everyone references "the one bad convention" that happened nearly TEN YEARS AGO when there is a furry convention happening pretty much EVERY WEEKEND somewhere in the world means we have a pretty damn good track record.
@keirFox One of the things I've noticed about the Seattle fandom is that the Rainfurrest thing has made everyone incredibly resigned. Any time I bring up the topic of maybe starting a new furry convention in the area that isn't ANW's squeaky clean "We're not those gross furries, we're Anthropomorphic Arts Enthusiasts!" image, the reaction has almost universally been "Nah, there's no point, nobody would ever have us ever again..."
It was almost a decade ago. There have been literally HUNDREDS of successful furry conventions around the globe to point at since then. It's so defeatist, it makes me sad.
systemd has a reasonably good user interface to process initialization but I am still extremely fucking pissed off at how much it just continues to absorb other system functionality forever and ever and ever. It’s never enough. Process init is like a tiny sliver of its scope these days. And if you criticize it you’re instantly shot down as a “hater”
Every criticism of systemd seems to get responded to with “oh so you liked sysv init, you dinosaur?” And I say for the millionth time no, sysv init was awful and needed to be replaced, but it got replaced by something that is also not good, but for totally different reasons.
So, I do have a Signal account, but it's under my real name and real phone number. I'm happy to share it with people I know but I keep it a little closer to my chest than other places.
More and more, online presence is tied to your real name or contact info and it's hard to have a separate online identity and real life identity, and frankly: That sucks.
After some cleaning and rearranging and tweaking, we now have a fully functional SGI R4400 Indigo 2 Max Impact system running alongside my R10K Indigo 2 High Impact system. So much IRIX! So many 3D! Textured polygons everywhere! Nearly $100,000 worth of computing power in 1996! (My phone has laughably more texture RAM these days…)
SGI stuff is pretty dangerous nostalgia for me because I did a lot of IRIX work at SGI really early on in my career and much of it is still bouncing around in the inner recesses of my brain.
Someone gave me this Sun Ultra 2 last year, and I haven’t even opened it up to check it out yet. I think today I will explore to see whether it’s even functional or not.
It’s not too bad inside at all. A little dusty, but I’ve seen much worse. I know the PROM battery will be long since dead, but I’m not going to worry about that right now.
Not a day goes by that I'm not grateful I didn't get on the Internet until I was 19, and that social media as we know it didn't really exist until I was in my 30s
As it stands, I did and said some CATASTROPHICALLY stupid and embarrassing things on Usenet and long defunct mailing lists, but those posts are well and truly scrubbed from history. I am at peace with this.
If you want to know why software is getting worse: the current trend, for a while now, has been to eliminate QA departments entirely. This sucks, because I have a TON of respect for QA engineers. The ones I’ve had the pleasure of working with have come up with ways of breaking my software that I never would have dreamed of.
Oh no. I posted about this on LinkedIn and the general consensus is “Well duh, we don’t need QA any more because we unit test!” followed by “and besides that, QA always argued with us that we couldn’t ship, so we’re better off without them”. I’m dying. Please help.
I’m upset about the state of phones. I think I’m done buying Apple products for good, I really don’t like the direction of the company and how locked down the ecosystem is, but I also fundamentally hate Google, so don’t want to use their products either. GrapheneOS only runs on Pixel phones, but maybe getting a used one would be OK. Less money in Google’s hands.
I’ve just become more radicalized about free software and open use of hardware you own, as I’ve gotten older, which is why Apple’s closed ecosystem appeals to me so much less these days. But I refuse to use Android because fuck Google for seeing me as a data mining product. I won’t use their services at all, period.
There’s an all-hands meeting at work this morning and I can’t take it, I literally just left. It’s nothing but self-congratulatory capitalist wankery, name dropping about Davos, and AI hype. God, the AI hype. Actual quote: “Our challenge to you: Everyone MUST build a product that incorporates AI this year!” Nothing about “these problems seem ripe for AI so we should look into how it can help,” no, it’s literally “Figure out how to use AI and use it, we don’t care how”. OK, have fun with that, you’ll be doing it without me.
This is why I wish I could retire. I don’t honestly have any hope of retiring ever, I won’t have the money for it, but especially right now I hate the tech industry with a passion. It makes me both angry and miserable. There is no goodness left in it, just grifting.