Notices by Syn-ACK, Pentagenerian :facepalm: (synack@corteximplant.com)

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.

I'm so cautiously optimistic about this that I'm trying hard not to celebrate because I have this crushing, cynical streak that tells me that this will either a) somehow get prevented from going into effect or b) not be around long enough to make a difference in the grand scheme of things.

But if it stands, and if it survives the 2024 US elections, then this is a HUGE moment for US workers, especially white collar and primarily tech workers. I'm currently under a 1-year non-compete myself and this will essentially nullify it the day it goes into effect. I could call up all of my contacts and go work for them immediately with no fear of reprisal.

And my former company is one of those that chooses to pursue non-compete agreements, so this would free up so many of my compatriots that still work there to go find something else. I really, really hope that this stands!

RE: https://press.coop/@NPR/112322456404917951

Time for another STICKER DUMP!!! Placed some of my new influx of stickers from @thegibson and @jadedtwin to get in the hacker mood. Can you spot them?

Listening to CD 02 of the Hackers 25th anniversary soundtrack (2020) where they finally released all the cool-ass instrumental tracks from the movie that should have been released on the soundtrack in 1995.

Like the music from the scene where they are trying to reconstruct the worm.

Or the track for the music where Joey is hacking Elingson and finds the worm in the garbage.

And of course, "Grand Central Station" from the "kill the Gibson" scene and end credits.

Been waiting for these tracks entirely too long! Hack the planet!

This is just one of my periodic reminders that the next time you're watching a movie with weapon fighting (or any #martialarts, really), even though the actors make it look easy, it certainly is not. Those actors are certainly athletic, but it's highly likely that they are not skill martial artists.

Those fight scenes are choreographed down to the last strike and the sequences are practiced over and over until they look good on film. In fact, many of them are choreographed specifically so that they DO look good on film. They are nothing like real fights with weapons.

Getting anywhere close to that kind of weapon mastery in real life requires years of training, dedication, and practice. There is no shortcut. And trying to fight while blindfolded is myth and legend and will get you hurt or killed. I'm just sayin'.

So by all means, learn #kobodo, #iaido, and whatever #martialarts interest you. Just don't expect to come out the other side an action hero, because they're not real. :holdthepain:

(Can you tell I've started watching Ahsoka recently?)

@kaiserkiwi @mhhhkathi I like the sort of industrial design of those. Very nice! And it looks like yours are the same colors as my fidget spinner. :spongebobsmug:

@aral Textbook case of the fox watching the hen house, I think.

@futurebird As someone who grew up Baptist, lived through the D&D/heavy metal/Satanists kidnapping kids on Halloween/etc panics, and now as an adult who still holds Christian beliefs, I can say that it comes down to two words: power and control.

In the Before Times when books, newspapers, TV, and word-of-mouth were the only sources of information (and the news media was still trusted), all it took was for the media to suggest a scenario and the rank-and-file would get all a-flutter because they couldn't fact-check it like we can now. If it was reported as news, well then it must be true!

IIRC, it was Ronald Reagan's campaign that figured out how to mobilize evangelical Christians as a political demographic (remember the Moral Majority and Focus On the Family?) and once the higher-ups in those religions got a taste of the power and control that politics can offer, the inevitable slide into today's Christian Nationalism was begun. Since power begets money (and vice versa), they would never attack the institutions that keep that power and control intact (and the money flowing), so they choose to use terrifying "spiritual forces" (that can't be rationally questioned) to generate fear in their followers and redirect their moral outrage towards other things in order to keep the money and power status quo.

@feld @drwho is this the Oregon Trail Reboot that I've been hearing about or a National Lampoon's Family Vacation video game that I somehow missed? That car looks an awful lot like a Family Truckster.