Notices by rixx (rixx@chaos.social)

OH: putting the sad in sysadmin

if my laptop has to be haunted, it might as well haunt the police, is what i'm saying

my chronicles today:

boot 1: pc starts, looks and sounds fine, I start browsing. after a minute, Firefox hangs. kill -9 does nothing. I find out that my sudo password does not work (?!)
I reboot. after 8 minutes of watching systemd try to shut down the system bit by bit, I finally hard-reset

boot 2: sudo works. network doesn’t. that is, the manager comes up, doesn’t complain, everything looks good, it just refuses to connect to wifi

boot 3: everything seems to be working. very suspicious

prompted by some honestly hilarious behaviour of my laptop today:

remember how some people have different systems they can boot into when entering different encryption passwords (aka the real one and the plausible deniability one)?

do that, but make the decoy one as fucked up as possible. symlink stupid shit. remove /dev/null. fuck around with sudo so it only works 15% of the time

“of course, sir, here’s my laptop. I use it to learn Linux! I think I’ve set it up slightly wrong, but it works!”

1) vote (esp in the German election today, but also generally)

2) this, when you look at the results and want to cry / burn things down / stay in bed forever

Form, meet function (via https://morphimus.tumblr.com/post/171062926274)

As pointed out by @lutoma (thanks!) it seems like they removed the code that auto-generates these reports, and instead instance administrators have to generate them manually (as per the kinda hidden, collapsed conversation in https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/28693/files#r1450641772)

I’ll leave the issue open as a documentation request, as there is no information on any of this unless you watch the PRs and read the source code, and also as a request to make the feature more flexible (or at least remove the cringe.)

#mastoadmin

Ugh, just saw the new #wrapstodon feature that adds a “Year in Review” to Mastodon – it’s up on mastodon.social already, and will be part of v4.4.0.

It’s super number-go-up brain: You’re part of the top x % of Mastodon users! You had so many new followers and posts!

Plus a super cringe and unnecessary “We won’t tell Bernie” message under the top-% stat. Jfc.

I opened an issue asking to let server administrators turn this off before it even starts: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/33150

#mastoadmin

@kkarhan I am not aware that Mastodon has integrated functionality to stop reports, does it?

If a local user were to abuse the report function, we would talk to them or kick them. If a user on a remote instance were to abuse the report function, we would talk to their administrators, and if they declined to take action, we would consider stopping federating with the instance.

In any case, I think adding that requirement to a spam manager is not the right place.

@kkarhan It is true that I and probably most #mastoadmin|s have a script to bulk resolve reports against a specific user, because the Mastodon moderation interface helpfully groups reports by user, and then gives you zero tools to resolve all of them. But that's really a three-liner script, and hopefully in only another dozen years or so even something you can do in the web interface.

I’ve finally caved and wrote an auto moderator for Mastodon that can take care of some reports automatically.

Running it manually for now to see if it works as intended, but I think this will be a net positive for us. Watch this space 👀 #mastoadmin

So, when you block an instance as a mastodon administrator, on account of that instance spewing spam like mad and also none of your users following anybody there, this will NOT resolve any of the >100 reports your users have openend against that instance, despite the reports now being useless.

And of course, Mastodon still has no bulk editing of reports, so you die the death of a thousand ~~papercuts~~ report-clicks … or you just add report-resolving to your management script:

#mastoadmin

Imagine wondering “When’s the next time that Christmas will be a Tuesday/Wednesday, for those sweet optimal public holidays (Jan 1st being exactly a week later)?”

Now imagine asking, idk, google or Siri or god forbid an actual calendar, instead of turning to the best tool for the job: systemd.

#systemd #linuxadmin #linux #systemd

“Harry, did you put the Olson database into your init system?”, Dumbledore asked calmly.

(that’s two “Dumbledore asked calmly” posts today, which led to me getting informed that the movie that gave rise to this meme came out 19 years ago, which is WRONG wrong wrong)

Late to the party, but another consequence of the whole IO territory thing:

“On Friday 21st March 2025 at 02:50 UTC the sun will finally set on the British "Empire"”: https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/1fv9ti6/on_friday_21st_march_2025_at_0250_utc_the_sun/

When I want to have a lot of fun, I tell people who are into languages and grammar that I think that Finnish has cases and Hungarian doesn't. We call this a scissor statement, and it's great, because

· it’s kinda-somewhat representing a majority position
· it sounds completely stupid, especially when you don't know more than that the two are related, and then it sounds like a real headache when you know that all the ~15 Finnish cases have a clear relative in Hungarian.

Fun!

@aral Yeah uh thank you for that contribution, very helpful, amaze

Related: Is there something like a caniuse.com newsfeed that tells me when a feature has become supported by all major browsers (or, ideally, supported by major browsers for a month, half a year, a year …)?

Imagine if web.dev, the web development blog by the Chrome team, had the latest coolest tech like … RSS feeds for their blog. Then you could just subscribe to https://web.dev/series/baseline-newly-available and get notified about newly availble CSS features …

(To add insult to injury, they load their list of blog posts via JS, so you can't even point a good feed reader at the /blog/ page and have it scrape for new posts. Eww.)