Notices by Steven D. Brewer 🏳️‍⚧️ (stevendbrewer@wandering.shop)

@cstross What *I* want is an AI agent to hammer a company's phone tree until it gets a human on the line, puts them on hold, rings me, and then connects us.

I've decided to create a filter so posts containing the string "Trump" and "DJT" appear behind a content warning. But I made the mistake of naming the filter "trump" which meant I saw "Filtered by: trump" in my feed over and over again. So I changed it to be named "that fucker". Much better!

So *that's* how he did it!

@doctormo @jwildeboer I saw someone tell RMS that he "had to" use non-free software for his job, and Stallman said (unironically) that they were making an economic choice and they could make a different choice to use Free Software. I think this is the kind of privilege that raises problems. People have real lives and it's unrealistic for most people to refuse to use non-free software when the reality is that they have to pay rent and buy food.

Someone has a chew, and all is right with the world. #DogsOfMastodon

@Woodswalked @Melissabeartrix Back in the day, I had a friend who used SCSI drives and would frequently hot-swap the connections.

"You're supposed power those off before swapping the connection," I said.

"Yeah, I know they *say* that," he said. "But I've never had a problem."

About a year later, I saw him again and he was powering everything off before swapping the connection.

"Oh!" I said. "I notice you're powering those off before swapping them out now."

He grimaced. "Yeah."

@Melissabeartrix I first encountered transgender people more than forty years ago and, got to know several well more than thirty years ago. But I would not have seen myself authoring fiction with a trans protagonist until after I had very close friends who were trans more recently. So, although I accepted trans people before, my understanding has undoubtedly deepened over the last twenty years.

"Have you seen 'the Tick'?"
"What? Do you mean like the superhero?"
"Well, I don't know about superhero. Look. There."
"Omigod. It is a tick."
"Isn't he dreamy?"
"No. It's a tick."
"What? Are you prejudiced against ticks?"
"Well, yes."
"Why?"
"Ticks are parasites!"
"Now you're just being pejorative. What has a tick ever done to you?"
"Ticks have literally sucked my blood. Without consent."
"Oh, sure. Some ticks may have done that, but not all ticks."
"I don't care. I hate ticks."
"Tick hater."

@JasonThorne Hydro pole?

@liztai My only comment is that I'm extremely unlikely to visit anything hosted on substack.

@taur10 @sfwrtr I started using Libreoffice when it was still Star Office. Every year or two, I see people cursing because the interface for Word has changed and become less useful & more confusing. Lately, it's like Clippy took over and unless Clippy thinks you're trying to "write a letter," you can forget it because the tools you need to write a letter aren't even visible. Libreoffice, on the other hand, has basically the same interface as it did back then. Oh, Libreoffice… Never change!

@sfwrtr You might find that Libreoffice is actually better at reading old Word files than Word.

@eddeeMN @tchambers @pluralistic The AT protocol of Bluesky offers that (sorta): you can set your domain name as your handle. And then it's just your domain name that you control: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial

Of course, it only works on Bluesky because they aren't actually federating yet.

"Mastodon is too complicated, so I switched to Bluesky."

"Dating is too complicated, so I switched to hookers."

"Mastodon is too complicated, so I switched to Bluesky."

"Cooking is too complicated, so I just make cup ramen."

@ITOmarHernandez

Being a polymath is fun and will get you lots of admiration from people, but it sure doesn't pay very well.

@Unixbigot @cstross

Let's not forget that the muskrat is in a totally different situation, however. He has PLENTY o' money to pay off the loansharks. He's enshittifying the birdsite just for funsies.

I still argue that it's performance art: he's providing an object lesson to people about why you shouldn't let important things get purchased and run by billionaires and he spent $44B to show how much he meant it.

And a bunch of people *still* haven't gotten the point.

@cstross @Unixbigot

You may well be right. If it *is* a performance, he's not broken character yet.

OK. I'm being somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But I still think that's the lesson that we should take away from the experience.

Tech billionaires (e.g. muskrat and dorsalfin) all seem super wet-dream excited by all the cryptocurrency bullshit. I suspect it will turn out, at some point, that a state actor (like the NSA) has figured out how to pwn cryptocurrencies & can destroy/destabilize them whenever it's convenient to them. I don't have any evidence for this: just extrapolating from how far ahead they typically are with respect to current cryptography. Don't drink the crypto kool-aid, man. You're a sucker if you do.