Notices by Robey ☠️ (robey@messydesk.social)

my name is `adduser`
and my brother's `useradd`
one of us is good
and one of us is bad!

which of us is which?
there is no way to know
we change names sometimes
to keep you on your toes!

current debian no longer writes to syslog 😦

if you look in /var/log, someone left a README file.

the README says "you are looking for logs? but you cannot find them?" and continues in broken english, smugly telling you that systemd has made logs obsolete, and you should use "journal cattle" to ask politely for your own logs.

[did you just tell me to fuck off, jim?]

if you run journal cattle, it shows a page of syslog from april. if you hit G to go to the end, it hangs forever.

[slow clap]

i dont understand why snaps even exist. all of the ones i've tried have at least one deep problem, and the existence of broken snaps in the ecosystem makes it harder to find the actual working debs.

the only real accomplishment of snaps? irritating people into switching away from ubuntu

...maybe this is a greater good

if you know, you know

@evan yeah, i wrote about this last week (and none of it makes me happy) :( https://messydesk.social/@robey/113313280433776883

if i ever threaten to "pivot to AI", i hope yall mock me so bad i shutdown my server too

@brooke i was in love with (a stolen copy of) desqview in high school but never heard of the x11 version until a few years ago and still can't hold the idea in my head

@technomancy @brennen yeah i'm just thinking that if you used DDG because they advertised better privacy... but then they're just a gateway forwarding your data to a big tech company... you might perceive a little deception

@brennen @technomancy also we should have a pithy name for this, like "privacy laundering"

wait, duckduckgo is just another name for bing?!?!

@evan as you probably know, this actually happened in the 1910s! i've been fascinated with that idea lately

why does austria act so shitty toward other euro countries?

i think you can assume a modern dev machine has python & nodejs... but you can't assume it has a golang compiler or wants one.

@evan yeah, imho jwz had the right idea: replies to a post should be a timeline/collection, curated by the author, hosted with the the post...

"inReplyTo" already allows thread-chaining for clients that want to assemble a thread view, AP already has excellent timeline/collection support, all it needs is a field on the post (like "replyCollection"?) to indicate the id of this collection.

this could be a short FEP. i'd just want to try implementing it in my server first to make sure it'd work.

i'm afraid i still can't get over blowhards saying "supply chain security" when they really mean "we built a capitalist enterprise on top of a pile of donated work from idealistic hackers, and now we're mad that they didn't have the same goals and process as our paid employees."

literally fuck off with that. people writing code for their friends is not your "supply chain", it's just an extremely bad business model for lazy people.

why did i keep this

i've been out here in the open social network so long that periodically, when a new boat of bedraggled thought leaders washes up & starts saying things like "it's so cool that you can say the word 'tree' without bleeping it!" or "isn't it weird how nothing smells like sulfur?" ... i legitimately don't know how to react.

that thing is happening again where a big chunk of my feed is people arguing passionately against a topic that nobody is actually arguing *for*.

they construct a boogieman by reading everyone else's impassioned pleas against it and jumping on the bandwagon, without looking to see if the boogieman is real...

mixed feelings about "activitypub DMs are broken" because i'm 99% sure AP doesn't define DMs at all.

in this ONE case, yall are saying "activitypub" when you mean "mastodon" 😬

i hate these kind of debbie-downer articles where someone says something you love is doomed because we can't have nice things. "the fediverse is good therefore it's doomed!!!" cool. great. you must be a lot of fun at parties.