Notices by Mike Ely (me@social.taupehat.com)

It's 2026, and "devil's lettuce" now refers to actual lettuce.

@pmonks @ai6yr I used to live in Kyburz on Highway 50 and every snowy day going over the hill to SLT I'd see these idiots absolutely careening up the hill in their 4WD SUV or brodozer, and basically every time I'd see some jackwad doing that I'd find them stuffed into a snowbank a couple miles up the road. So long as they were out of their car yelling into a cellphone I'd just honk and keep on clanking up the hill in my tire chains.

@pmonks @ai6yr "Four-wheel drive means four-wheel slide!"

When I lived in Tahoe the silver Subaru wagon was so common that my wife once unlocked and got into one and only when she was about to start the car did she realize it was someone else's silver Subaru wagon. Good cars for the area.

When people say Shakespeare isn't relevant to modern life it's good to have people like Sir Ian around to prove them wrong:

Today in "Why I'll be working from the office on Tuesday"

You haven't truly lived the life of a #sysadmin until you're googling around to figure out some issue and find a post about it where someone's asking the exact same question and... it's you. You, asking the exact same question ten years ago. And nobody answers.

@zakalwe @ai6yr @stepheneb @stevewfolds best non-studded options I've ever had were Blizzaks. It was almost comically difficult to break those loose, and they were otherwise a smooth tire to drive on.

Definitely want to change them out when snow season is over though - they have the same wear characteristics as pencil erasers.

Sign I carried today at our local #nokings gathering:

Network admins who disable ICMP: do you also take the numbers off the front of your house to keep the burglars out? #sysadmin

Sometimes you work on the same problem all day only to have the outcome of your efforts be nothing more than a hopefully well-written bug report. #sysadmin

Donald's "proof of life" press conference is currently 20 minutes late:
https://www.youtube.com/live/I8DnGstg2-k

@jwz thanks to all the replies, but IMHO they've only served to illustrate the nature of my complaint. Why are all these workarounds (pyenv, pipx etc) even needed to begin with? It all comes back to the Python dev team eternally chasing after the next shiny thing while giving zero fucks about whether the new version is going to detonate all the code previously written to the language.

I get breaking changes in major versions (python2 vs Python, for example) but to break compatibility between minor versions and point releases is just a dick move.

@jwz I'm so sick and fucking tired of playing "chase the cheese" between Python versions. Is there some philosophical objection they have to stabilizing the language, or do the developers expect sysadmins to forever live in pyenv version hell?

If I wanted to be saddled with that kind of bullshit I'd still be running Windows.

Pro tip: if there's a big #demonstration coming up that you want to attend, be sure to swap your on-call shift with someone who doesn't plan to attend. Yes, I absolutely did get paged just as I was driving out to the local #nokings rally and now I'm stuck at home being a sad #sysadmin

That old and once-worthy saw has sadly fallen out of date.

Got a lot of compliments on this awesome shirt by @mac84tv at the incredibly well attended #HandsOff demonstration in #santarosa today.

Was looking over the breakout sessions at #RedHat Summit, and sure enough... I suspect this is mandatory at every big FOSS event. Every year for decades now I've seen this session, and however much I might wish this were the year I can reasonably expect to see the session come back in 2026. #sysadmin

When my daughter was in sixth grade her friends invited her into a group chat. At some point they started telling each other all the swear words they knew. Not cussing at each other, just listing all the words. This was when they discovered that instead of my daughter they had invited her grandmother who Does. Not. Cuss.

You can probably imagine why I've been thinking about that today.

The world owes @pluralistic an unending debt of gratitude for the word "enshittification," a word so useful that even my browser's spell-checker recognizes it. As a succinct way of conveying a somewhat broad concept, it has opened up space for a lot of thought and conversation... and the occasional not-terrible listicle. Thanks, man.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/as-internet-enshittification-marches-on-here-are-some-of-the-worst-offenders/

Fucking #gnome sometimes (most of the time). I've got a fairly intricate op to run tonight and under #kde I would be able to re-title all the shells I need to have open to run it but in Gnome? "Derrr, we removed that option... it was 2 hard 4 luzers to understand!"

I swear to all that matters, the UX experimentation perpetrated by Gnome is a pestilence rivaled only by that of #systemd

Once again, Torvalds was right:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-December/msg00021.html