Notices by Esprit de Vore (aphyr@woof.group)

the future is great

@dansup @shadowwwind baraag's about page still leads with a discussion of the child pornography prevention act of 1996, which, uh, does raise some questions for me on the "sketchy content" front. They still haven't moderated any of the accounts we reported last year for images of adults fucking young children.

@dansup @shadowwwind (I dunno whether this is relevant for fedidb's stats, was just wondering if they'd changed the behavior we banned em for)

@mcc Stern-Gerlach was like day *one* of my first QM course and I remember thinking "Oh, okay, great. They just wanted to come right out of the gate and shatter any expectation we had that our intuition is right."

if you release a .deb that installs cleanly on stock debian stable I will kiss you sweetly while whispering words of affirmation into your ears

I am begging software projects to release programs as tarballs or plain old static binaries. I don't know what a Helm chart is. I am not installing an entire Kubernetes cluster. Docker breaks LXC and firewalls and is constantly breaking for mysterious reasons. I would rather submit myself to hours of `./configure && make && make install` frustration than try to hack through the endless hellscape of containerized deployment systems.

Today in cars: a woman saw me signal to merge into her lane from the bike lane (obstructed by a parked car), sped up to box me out, almost hit the car in front of us, and spent the next 20 seconds screaming at me before I left her behind.

Starting to think I should record these and send a monthly dispatch to city council.

@siege first off, of COURSE your gangs don't say that, those are Brian Jacques' moles from Redwall 🤣

Second, you do NOT have to explain, but adding myself to the ranks of baffled yanks here. I was using a pocketknife for camping & fixing computers at... 10? I still have that knife, along with four others. Use 'em pretty much every day. I don't think I could have done my high school job without 'em.

@siege oh wow now that I'm reading https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives I've definitely broken UK knife law. I usually carry a Leatherman Wave multi-tool on long trips for repairs, and both primary blades lock. It's a safety thing!

Again maybe this is a US vs Canada thing but in the US, capital gains and losses apply to the *difference* between basis price (what the stock was valued at when the company gave it to you) and sale price. You only get the illustrated scenario if the stock the company gives you has a nominal FMV of ~$0, and you go on to sell it for $1M.

Aside--this is part of why startup options occasionally bankrupt employees! You can wind up owing huge tax bills on grants of illiquid or worthless stock.

I keep seeing this post today so it might be a good time to remind folks that in the US stock grants and RSUs are considered income, and you are taxed on that income just like other forms of compensation. If you get a grant of stock with fair market value of $1M, you're taxed on $1M of income. RSUs, options, forward exercising, etc. shift around *when* and how you're taxed, but like... stock is not tax-free lol.

https://mstdn.ca/@ned/112298407262329100

Ah yes, the two genders

has gpg --send-keys *ever* worked? I've been using gpg for like twenty years and I feel like every damn time I create a key I end up screaming at it

If you're on bear.community, you have 30 days to export your data and migrate to a new instance.

Bear.community ran over their plan limits in November. Masto.host hasn't been able to reach the admin, @urso, in over a month. That's why they've been down this weekend. Masto.host has kindly agreed to bring the instance back online temporarily, but it will very likely shut down permanently on January 31.

Please let your friends on bear.community know!

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

This comment on Jepsen's typography and writing made my day: https://lobste.rs/s/ow3jpq/jepsen_mysql_8_0_34#c_bfkbvt

Remember back before systemd how when something went wrong on a computer it put text into a log file and you could find out what happened? That was neat. We should do that again.

@technomancy @ieure yeah like I want to go back to Firefox but it's wedged in some kind of dissociative kerning fugue which makes half of the web look like a ransom note, I have to manually re-auth to GPG every time I push a deploy because the agent session thing is broken, there's some kind of horrible race conditon where typing characters in the file browser to select a file just, like, ignores 1 in 12 keystrokes, power management/screensavers are a disaster

you know typical linux problems :D

OK linux nerds. I've been a long-time Debian user with minimal WMs: Blackbox, Fluxbox, Openbox. I love how configurable and fast they are.

But... most of my apps are Gnome and they're so hard to keep working in a standard X setup. I want working color management and display drivers and SSH/GPG keyrings that aren't horribly confused all the time. Thinking I may have to bite the bullet and move to a "normal" desktop environment.

What are folks using these days? XFCE on Debian? Ubuntu? Mint?

Shout out to the Mastodon 4.2.x increase in Redis memory usage.

Also for completely inscrutable reasons `tootctl media remove` no longer runs in cron. Runs fine interactively. It's sourcing .bashrc, setting the RAILS_ENV envvar, worked absolutely fine before the upgrade, but steadfastly refuses to do *anything* when scheduled in cron. :-/

Just under a year ago I complained that search results were gonna become hot garbage as people started using LLMs to generate content farms for SEO:

https://woof.group/@aphyr/109458338393314427

Today we've got SEO people bragging about how successful that tactic is:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509