Notices by Syn-(t)ACK.sys :facepalm: (synack@corteximplant.com)

@benbrown I really considered coming down for these talks, but once I saw that Threads was going to be there and also got a look at the topics of most of the talks, I figured it would just serve to make me angry and defensive as I have fundamental disagreements with both Threads and Bluesky. Seemed very much leaning towards "how can we monetize federated social media" in far too many of those talks for my taste, at least where the abstracts were concerned.

That, coupled with my "old man disdain" for the general public and SXSW traffic and no easy way to get down there that won't cost me an arm and a leg and a whole host of other whiny and probably unfounded excuses, meant that I opted to stay up North here and save myself several levels of aggravation. :holdthepain:

I am sorry to miss Cory Doctorow's talk, though. Maybe I'll be able to deflate enough of my personal excuses to get down there tomorrow for that.

I will, however, be interested to hear your overall take on the discussions and what you thought about them after All Da Fun Is Dun. :bec_wink:

@ann3nova @hazelnot I second this. To get the full impact of the game, I would recommend watching both RoboCop and RoboCop 2.

I played the game all the way through and it is phenomenal. One of my favorites the year it released. It's is totally worth the $10, and would be a bargain at 3-4 times that discount price, IMO.

Dunno if I mentioned this already recently, but it turns out that the problems I was having with LinkedIn pages not loading in FF turns out to be related to my use of PrivacyPossum. Turning that bad boy off allows the pages to load.

Which, of course, means that there are other reasons to be glad that the page won't load, especially when clicking a link that came from an email sent directly to me. The only people that should be tracking that click (and then loading the content on the site specifically for that one thing) should only be LinkedIn.

I guess that's too much to hope for these days. Have I mentioned how much I hate LinkedIn in the last 5 minutes?

Because I do. I really, really do. 🤬

I long for the day that #VeilidChat becomes faster, more reliable and easy enough for "normies" to use that I can start to recommend it over Signal for private communications. 🤞

As for that reliability bit, WE NEED MOAR VEILID NODES! So if you've got some spare cycles on any boxes, hit up https://veilid.com/contribute/getting-started/ and Stereo MCs that shit!

I'm kind of fascinated with humanity's general inability to be comfortable with uncertainty or just not being able to explain absolutely everything. Human consciousness has a weird relationship with faith; I feel like we all desperately need it, but seem to resist the very notion of it as some sort of weakness or flaw, and I really wonder why that is?

Religion can't answer every question and neither can science, so what do we do with the unknown in-betweens? There are things that are just not capable of being known empirically in our existence until they're objectively witnessed somehow. It seems like most of us tend to approach this quandary in 1 of 3 ways: either ignore it as being inconsequential to our daily existence, put our faith in some system to explain everything, or take that faith to an extreme into the "mysteries that only a select few can understand" line of thinking.

I'm also surprised at how much that third viewpoint gets chosen. Every religious tradition and secular system always has sects of adherents that believe that there are deeper mysteries that only they are privy to that go beyond the boundaries of the established and "public" parts of that system. Again I find myself wondering, why is that?

The human mind is endlessly fascinating, chooms. :smart: :shrimplant: :spock:

@kkarhan @mircoxi Having worked for one of those job boards for nearly 6 years, those sites have a vested interest in not cracking down on those "fake jobs" because most of those jobs are priced as click generators, not by cost per application. So as long as someone keeps paying to advertise them, the job boards will keep making them available and the volume is high enough that they're not going to check them to see if they're still valid.

There is a fair (but small) percentage of jobs that stick around to get advertised even after they're expired due to the incestuous nature of job ad sharing between various digital outlets and since, again, there's no verification that the job is actually still valid, they don't get taken down unless the advertiser themselves complain about it. The sheer volume (we were processing 350M+ ads every day) makes it nearly impossible to do efficiently.

And the saddest thing is hearing our own HR crew defend these "ghost jobs" (or "evergreen" jobs, in HR parlance) as an acceptable thing just goes to show how absolutely broken the job advertisement and HR spaces have become.

I think I had a bit of an epiphany whilst slogging through the grocery store today in regards to my mental approach to food.

I realized that it's the planning, shopping, and preparation that I detest about cooking and eating healthy (since you can't trust any restaurants these days). I'm a procrastinator for one thing, but I also prefer spontaneity when it comes to the experience of enjoying the food I eat. I enjoy the experience of eating a specific food at a specific time and place. I'm one of those people that is like, "hmmm, I'm hungry for X so I'm going to go someplace to get it hot and ready." But once I'm done with that, I don't really want to eat it again for who knows how long, which is why I don't keep leftovers.

Every nutritionist has talked about planning out a week's worth of meals and how "easy" that makes things because you just have one cooking day and then you can eat that food over several days. But that's not a selling point for me; I don't want to eat tomorrow what I had today. I want variety, but I don't know when I'm going to want something specific, and telling me what's coming up just sort of makes me resent it, I guess.

Oof, this is a big psychological block I'm going to have to work through, I think.

@dalias @susankayequinn I wouldn't count on "it is unconstitutional" to be a valid defense once Cheeto Mussolini takes power. The whole goal of Project 2025 is to replace all the interpreters of the Constitution with people who will only interpret it the way that the fascists want.

Ugh, why is cleaning for family so much harder than any other time? It has taken me an hour to vacuum the hallway, entryway, mudroom, and office. I've still got half the house to go! And THEN I have to mop and clean the master bathroom.

:oof:

I always feel like my house has to be staged like as if I was going to sell it rather than it being the place I live that people are coming to visit. I guess if they want super clean every day, they can stay at a hotel.

I guess on the upside, this is the cleanest this house will likely have been since 2017 when my dad came down for a visit. :holdthepain:

Corporations are not people, therefore they cannot be (nor should they be) your "family".

You're experiencing Stockholm Syndrome.

Watching what's happening to Patreon today and the subsequent users not accepting their bullshit whining about "b-b-but the Big Bad Apple is making us do this!" is glorious.

Neither of these companies have to charge these fees, and Patreon doesn't have to be in bed with Apple - nobody needs another app that requires an app store (unless it has something to do with needing direct access to the underlying communications hardware of the device, IMO).

I hope that this situation a) takes both of these companies down a peg or three, b) it wakes up companies and stops all this "app madness", and c) that it is just the first salvo of the users fighting back against corpo greed and usury.

WE ARE NOT YOUR PRODUCT!

This is just my periodic toot into the void that I believe that one of the single biggest, most useful improvements that Mastodon could make is to implement reply controls and allow people to either turn them off completely, allow for follower-only replies and/or "allowed repliers" lists, and mute individual threads. And make those limits as rock-solid as possible.

Far from being the only thing necessary, I sincerely believe that this kind of user-level control would cut down the average user's reply-guy problem significantly.

GoToSocial does it, Akkoma sort of does it, and I believe Pleroma also does it. It's obviously not impossible or even that hard to implement.

Let the users determine their own levels of desired engagement. This "all or nothing" thing we have now is really frustrating.

:boost_ok: :reply_discouraged:

Listen up, kids - be aware that Netgear routers and such, even the high end ones like the Orbi 750 I just bought, do NOT come with a built-in firewall. You have to pay a yearly sub for their AppArmor service (which is BitDefender under the covers) unless you want to muck around with chaining a firewall device to protect your inbound network. [EDIT: Otherwise, your only protection is the standard NAT behavior.]

Nowhere in any of the documentation or product reviews (that I saw, at least) was I warned that the AppArmor sub was required if I wanted inbound firewall protection to my network.

Don't get soaked for more money like I just did, kids. Save yourself the frustration.

It's crazy to me that WhatsApp and Snapchat have TV commercials. Like, whut? Y?

Guess this means maybe they're entering the terminal enshittification stage? The young people that made it popular have all moved on to something else so now they have to get the olds on the train?

Smdh

@atomicpoet Well of course I can't find it now that I want it, but I was reading an article earlier that this was an automatic stop-loss trigger that had been set 2 years ago. It's a fairly common occurrence in companies to prevent stockholders from losing too much money in the event of a massive loss. Since the Crowdstrike listing fell like 20% today (or maybe even more now, I haven't seen), that quick drop triggered the sale.

So the timing seems suspect, but it's apparently working as designed and was something set in motion as a hedge, likely when that person became CSO and got some massive stock in the company.

I have a serious question for all'a youz tech folks out there that have been burned out by Big Tech and the corpo wageslave game that is "software development":

When you decided that you were no longer interested in doing corpo software development, what area, industry, or career did you move into instead?

I've decided that I no longer want to work in the tech industry anymore; I just don't agree with 99% of it at this point, and that 1% is proving to be ridiculously hard to find. So once you decided that you were done with corpo dev, where did you go and what did you choose?

Basically, I need some inspiration of what I can do next for my "second act" because I've been unable to figure out a path for myself. I need some ideas of what careers I can parlay my decades of software/biz experience into that will be more beneficial to society. High salary holds no interest for me at this point; it's more about the fulfillment of the work I do that matters.

And for the record, the Software Engineering Manager jump doesn't seem to be working. I've gotten exactly 0 responses to any of those types of jobs to which I have applied.

Boosts and replies welcome!

:boost_ok: :reply_ok:

@feld On paper, maybe it's individually not a threat to the grid. But it's certainly not going to be the first thing to be told (or made) to shutdown when the grid IS "running hot" and tenuous. Plus, ERCOT is all helmed by business people who are out to make money and it's them and the politicians that are dragging their feet to make the improvements that are necessary to ensure more reliable power.

Instead, they tell individuals to "live with" their houses being 80 degrees inside, not washing clothes or dishes, and limiting other things to "keep the power on".

Meanwhile, half-empty office buildings light up the night sky like giant beacons of wastefulness and these shitcoin farms keep chuggin' away because, you know, capitalism.

And now, come to find out, not only are they wasting power that could be used instead to make the lives of average citizens more comfortable but their usage is actually causing physical harm to these people?

Don't even get me started on Dan Patrick. That's just lip-service and you know it. If they were that concerned, why am I still getting notices to "conserve energy" 4 years down the line from the first big electrical disaster while cryptofarms like this are allowed to keep running?

Dan-o is also one of the major opponents of renewable energy around here, too.

@feld I was not aware of that, so thank you for sharing it with me. I would be interested to know how soon it kicks in before residential customers are asked to conserve.

But it does still rub me the wrong way that ERCOT will pay them to shut down, and pay them ludicrously more than they actually would have made as a business ($22 million, according to that article). Seems like that money could be better spent being put towards that growth and expansion that you mentioned earlier. It's like those ridiculous farm subsidies where farmers get paid NOT to produce certain crops.

And that's just ONE business. How many others is ERCOT subsidizing? Where's MY check to not wash clothes?

IMO, the whole privatization of the electric grid here in Texas has been a huge mistake, because we can't draw power from the National Grid(s) when we need to without paying massive fees. And now, finding out that this business which makes far, far less than the resources that it consumes cost is now also having a physical effect on surrounding individuals, it seems to me that shutting them down and making all that energy that they consume available to everyone else - primarily individuals - will make the grid more resilient since it's only going to get hotter (and colder) as time moves on, at least for the foreseeable future.

@chaotin Well, Granville, TX, is right in the path of Tropical Storm Beryl, which has been pounding the Texas coastline and is reportedly responsible for the internet outages across the state yesterday. We can only hope that the storm did enough damage to this facility to take it offline.

Otherwise, I may have to see if I can't rustle up some hacker friends to see if we can somehow knock their power offline.

It's fuckwads like these that are making our power situation down here even worse, and if I were Governor, I'd come down on that cryptofarm like a sack of bricks. But since our current governor is a Trumpkin, that's never going to happen. :bec_sigh:

@pluralistic spreading some truth in The Bezzle:

America will never make life better for the millions of souls it has imprisoned. Never. It is not in our character. To be an American is to live with the festering background knowledge that you are in a land that imprisons more of its people than any country in the history of the world—a land with more prisoners than Stalin’s USSR or Hu Jintao’s China or P. W. Botha’s Apartheid South Africa.

With so many in prison, either you have to believe that you are living in the midst of a great many secret criminals, or you have to confront the fact that you live in a place where the only thing standing between you and decades in a prison (running at two or three times its nominal capacity) is luck … and connections.