Notices by brennen (brennen@federation.p1k3.com), page 2

it's december the 18th. are you trying to get one last thing in at work, but you just need someone else to give it a little signoff or review?

consider instead: the joys of puttering about in your little corner of things on something no one else thinks about at all. taking a long walk at lunchtime. looking at the fat little winter birds flitting about in the bare branches outside your window and requiring no one else at all to assemble a mental model of anything.

@algernon i think there are few really _good_ options, but i'll at least express a narrow preference for things that make it difficult to create deeply nested hierarchies.

YAML and JSON are both ultimately a scourge not because of their syntax, but because they enable a tendency towards putting stuff inside of other stuff that rapidly escalates towards pathology.

@skinnylatte @ranjit i'm personally innoculated against this (after a week or so i begin to itch for visibile horizons and large expanses of plants), but my partner isn't and i suspect it may eventually happen to me by proxy.

@Andres4NY @ifixcoinops at this point, matrix is indistinguishable from an op designed to ensure that a viable fully-open-and-reasonably-secure-but-more-ergonomic successor to IRC never emerges. i don't really think that was done on purpose, but the effects are pretty much the same. an absolute disaster from end to end.

@RamenCatholic @SRLevine the original question reminded me of some science fiction i read with a city that crawls along a track just ahead of the terminator on... mercury, maybe?

@RamenCatholic @SRLevine ah, this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2312_(novel)

(it was... kind of uneven, but some fun ideas in there.)

@skinnylatte the general absence of the savory pie is america's single greatest culinary failing.

@skinnylatte people have been complaining about the problems of the take being on the booze for way longer than i've been alive, and they're right - but i do think it's a hard problem.

like a lot of the small places we go to music, people might not bat an eye at a hundred dollar bar tab for a couple people, and they probably tip well, but basically no one is going to pay fifty bucks a head for a ticket or cover charge, and i'm not sure where else you make up the $.

@aparrish @aeva "AI" and "the social contract" are vader and lando in that _empire strikes back_ scene where vader's like "pray i don't alter it any further"

@clarity i'm leaning towards we should probably do it a lot less

bleeding from each knuckle in a way that's probably familiar to anyone else who has ever made the mistake of using a chunk of hardware cloth for anything at all garden related

@baldur thinking about asbestos, lead, arsenic, PFAS, ...

it's hard not to conclude that a lot of the most harmful things are exactly those with a lot of apparent applicability / utility in a bunch of domains while the harms are hidden, deferred, papered over, obscured by industry collusion, etc.

generative AI feels like it fits this profile one way or another. its outputs *may* not be good, but either way the relevant people are convinced of the utility and hellbent on obscuring the harms.

@baldur and like... asbestos is an amazing insulator & fire proofer. lead is straightforwardly useful for countless things. all that stuff that 3M et al. have churned out that now shows up in every water supply and bloodstream is *super* useful. too bad about, you know, all the poisoning.

i wish we could talk about computational phenomena more like we talk about lead: yep, sure is useful if you don't give a shit about the nervous systems of your children.

we should have paid more attention to the cats who, for decades, put their bodies on the line to walk on keyboards and sit on laptops and prevent us from programming

@cy yeah, i mean, you're not wrong, but i think the exists-is-the-enemy-of-good thing - while often _triggered_ by corporate interference - is a dynamic that's kind of orthogonal to the specific source of the existing thing. sometimes the reason you don't have a better thing is that a longstanding community project or standard fills the niche for the people who'd otherwise create something better.

@pho4cexa a recurring rant of mine is that we don't have a good desktop mail client because everyone who would have written one is just using gmail, we don't have a good irc successor because everyone who would have written one either stayed on irc or fell for a con like matrix, we don't have good encryption tools because pgp, etc., etc. there's some general principle at work here.

@skinnylatte on multiple occasions, i have been yelled at by an entire social group for not bringing enough bags of salt & vinegar chips to a party or campout also heavily featuring dill pickles and pepperoncini. exactly one guess as to what nationality the majority of us are.

it's been 0 (zero) minutes since i last saw a set of overworked coworkers courting burnout as a result of AI bot scrapers abusing the ever living shit out of infrastructure we run as a service to the public

@theresnotime my first distros came on a couple of CDs i ordered for USD 2.00 apiece from... actually i don't remember. maybe walnut creek or something was involved? someone who specialized in selling cheap install media. i think i had to make a boot floppy to do the install.

nobody is going to out old-timer @liw on this one - who as i recall got his first linux because linus wanted somebody else to try it out...

@skinnylatte @brooke if they worked as well as these off-brand transitions lenses i have, they'd never shade genders except when staring directly into the gender sun