Notices by Quixoticgeek (quixoticgeek@social.v.st)

Good. Fining the people who by definition have the absolute least of anyone in society is an utterly bonkers idea. Glad Amsterdam is stopping it.

This is also a good time to remind everyone the leading cause of homelessness is a lack of a home. Homelessness could be solved in a matter of days by just providing people homes. It really is that simple.

https://nltimes.nl/2025/06/13/amsterdam-stop-fining-homeless-people-sleeping-city-streets

Having to obey the rules of the road has utterly ruined my delivery business. It's just not profitable if my drivers have to stop to avoid running people over.

The law should be changed to fix this...

(This is what certain LLM people sound like )

Dear developers, stop fucking around with the icon for your app. This is like me coming into your home, and moving all the labels on all the switches on your appliances. Don't do it. You're just pissing people off.

If the web has really reduced to the state where people are actively trying to persuade you from running services yourself, we really have utterly fucked it all up.

Yes, run your own mail server (go get @mwl 's book on it). Yes run your own DNS, stop leaking all your look ups to clownfair or Google). Yes control your software supply chain.

And definitely host your own git repo (with forjo or similar)

Stop centralisation of the decentralised web and internet.

https://dev.to/code42cate/5-things-that-should-be-illegal-to-self-host-3d21

When it rains after a prolonged period of dry weather, there is a smell created. It's called Petrichor. A wonderful word, and utterly useless trivia item. The smell is caused by something call Geosmin, which is produced by bacteria in the soil. Humans can smell it at 5 parts per TRILLION. In contrast Sharks can detect blood at concentrations of 1 part per million. On this one substance, we have a better sense of smell than sharks do for blood. Humans are amazing!

Makers of the fediverse. Is there a European equivalent to "send cut send" ?

#Making

People obsess about making sure that trains are full. Talk about moving warm air around during quieter periods of the day. Yet noone seems to point out the main competitor to rail travel involves traveling with a pair of arm chairs and a sofa, with a total number of passengers of 1. The inefficiencies of private cars are ridiculous.

As long as the whole train network, across the whole year and all services is >20% occupancy, it's more efficient than the competition.

Fediverse. Where would I find a royalty free, or CC recording of ode to joy ?

Needs to be as a file download, so MP3, ogg, flax, etc...

It's important to have a sense of perspective when everything is so divided...

#Photography #Netherlands

Can anyone recommend an idiots guide to the Canadian elections? Stuff like when will we know the result, how does counting work (please tell me it's not FPTP). etc...

Dear Google Gemini. Fuck off. And then when you're done fucking off, fuck off some more. I do not want you. I never wanted you. And I never will want you. Get fucked.

Ye gods. The techbros really need some humanities education.

The archeological find that is often touted as the first sign of civilisation is not a building, or a stone tool, or anything like that. Its a human femur bone.

Why? Because it's a human femur that has a healed break. This shows that a group of humans cared about this one human enough, to feed, & protect them when they were injured. This requires compassion. It requires empathy.

It's what makes us civilised

https://masto.ai/@Nonilex/114269455848126595

I've said it before. And I will say it again. Empathy is not weakness.

Empathy and compassion are what makes us civilised humans.

https://social.v.st/@quixoticgeek/114129556666486895

Ok. #IT nerds of the fediverse. Let's do a thought experiment. It's Monday morning, the boss comes in. We need to move all out stuff off US clouds onto our own hardware. He's bought us a small data centre (or larger server room). It's empty, just a raised floor, a power panel on the wall, Aircon, and two MAN generators outside. He wants you to buy everything to make this facility work. The catch. It has to all come from European companies. Everything.

What do you buy from who?

1/n

@GossiTheDog for something as important as Heathrow, I'm genuinely surprised that a single sub station should take the whole airport offline...you'd think they'd have better resilience.

Oops. Sorry to everyone presenting after me who has a QR code on your slides... #NETNOD

There's already too much junk dumped in the sea.

Please do not throw your amazon echo in the sea. Please throw it at nazi's instead. Far more productive.

https://hachyderm.io/@evacide/114179347767000042

Another week. Another museum. This week the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm. I came here largely to see this one tool chest.

It's the Mästermyr toolchest. A 1000 year old chest filled with blacksmithing and woodworking tools. It's an incredibly important find. Beautifully preserved in the bog. The tools are wonderful. I'd seen pictures and read about these tools, but to see them up close. That hack saw is exquisite.

I wonder how the chest ended up discarded.

#Making #Tools #History

This is a drill. I repeat. This is a drill.

It's scary how many code bases have basically become write only code. Whether that's through the use of sparkling autocarrot to write them (i.e. llms), or just because they are so huge (i.e. chrome). Or in some cases both.

When we have projects with 40+ million lines of code, it's basically impossible for anyone to understand what it's all doing. Using llms just makes that even harder.

This is technical debt meeting hyperinflation.