Notices by Urusan (urusan@fosstodon.org)

I just realized that the experience I have giving tech interviews must be more or less the experience that someone attractive has while dating.

There's a constant stream of candidates who really want this to work out, even if just for a little while. On my end it's an only occasionally stressful experience, focused around evaluating the overall potential of each candidate and looking out for red flags to avoid a potentially messy relationship.

The first row at the inauguration was all billionaires.
Me: Ah, this must be the public-private partnership I've heard so much about.

I'm glad Sesame Street is already communicating many of the messages I want to give to my children.

I voted.

My 5 year old just got a 2-in-1 laptop. What Linux distro should I put on it?

For a computer related one: Are you prepared for your baby daughter to seize and swipe randomly at the old Android smartphone playing lullabies and randomly open the menu, open the "low disk space clean up" notification, select all files, and initiate deletion?

Hope you backed that up!

There's so many holes in your defenses that you never even consider until you have children.

For instance did you know that your recliners are extremely vulnerable to AN ENTIRE CUP of chocolate milk being dumped down them into their dense machinery?

Do you have a contingency plan for that one?

Where this comes into play in my own life is mostly in my parawork.

Oh gosh, I cannot find the source I originally read for calling it parawork. It was an article that I'm pretty sure was inspired by this paper/book chapter:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289664304_Parawork
https://www.igi-global.com/chapter/parawork/21890

Parawork is work that happens outside of a formal workplace, and in particular some modern companies (like Facebook) are almost entirely built around capturing profit from parawork rather than traditional work.

I've been thinking about many things with this sort of theme recently.

I'm pretty good at playing the commerce game.

My mother is a successful small business owner and I helped her business get off the ground when it was in the startup phase. We talked shop for years.

The formula isn't actually that hard to understand, the difficult part is executing on it because you will have to deal with repeated failure, you will have to do things you don't want to do, and it's really high commitment.

Wife is currently at an art/craft convention.
Wife: *Long story about how teacher at a class that was extremely privileged and mildly incompetent, but owns a valuable business resource and how my wife ended up talking with them anyway*
Wife: Everything I've read about this says I should be forming relationships, but I really don't want to be friends with this person.
Me: They mean business relationships. *Thinks about my own professional life* Actually, think of it more like forming alliances.

Since social media like Mastodon was built in the image of Twitter, it takes the orientation around extracting the parawork of the network's users along with it unintentionally, and the users bring the commercial ethic they've been taught by our society (and which drives them to participate in parawork without compensation) along with them as well.

One of the things I like about Fedi/Mastodon is that it's a social media platform where the main beneficiaries of my parawork on the platform are the other users of the network.

If I put my writings out on a more mainstream social media platform, then they'd be heavily exploited for financial gain of large companies.

I mean, I'm sure they're scraping this for their own gain anyway (and of course Facebook has Threads to exploit Fedi), but my parawork is not ONLY supporting a closed platform.

Anyway, my main point is that money doesn't have to be explicitly exchanging hands for someone to end up playing this commercial development game.

You can seek out and build something of value for others with or without being compensated for it, and most of us have been heavily trained to do this.

...and in fact, there's so much of this valuable parawork going on all the time that trillion dollar companies are built on top of it.

Do you want your account to be a SUCCESS? Well, you'll need to NETWORK. You'll need to write CONTENT that ENGAGES other users. You need to be CONSISTENT and build your BRAND. Find your consistent followers, your FANS and keep them hooked.

Keep at it and maybe one day you'll HIT IT BIG!

GO VIRAL!

What's changed is that in my personal life I'm exhausted all the time right now by my workload.

As a result I'm unable to keep up with the stuff I built earlier and it inevitably has decayed, that's just the nature of the platform.

It's a less fun/engaging experience once you've fallen off the treadmill.

This was initially somewhat distressing, but then at some point veered into "why did I even build this in the first place?" Did I do this simply because that's what I was trained to do?

What I'm struggling with right now is re-evaluating this.

Up until recently, I've always felt like this is a good thing actually. Why object to people getting engaged by seeking out and creating value?

I mean, the parasitic nature of the big closed platforms is clearly negative, but fixing that is just a matter of getting people producing value in open platforms and cultures, right?

@ElDeadKennedy It's probably company swag, so they paid some company that normally makes this product to brand it for them.

Not sure why it's two distinct companies, though they are complimentary.

@icedquinn Does this work over a video screen? We need to science this if you haven't already in your testing.

File transfer on open source:
* rsync over SSH, it's fast, efficient, secure, unlimited, and you can transfer anywhere you have a user account available
* If it's text, you can also use git and get even more efficiency and detailed historical tracking and restore

File transfer on proprietary systems:
* AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Son: *Is playing beam.ng, a car physics simulator* This bus needs gas in the tank.
Me: *Looks over, the bus is a twisted wreck with the engine thrown free of the now spiral shaped bus body* I think this bus has bigger problems than an empty gas tank...
Son: So anyway, help me find a gas station so I can fill the tank.