Notices by Sam Whited (sam@social.coop)

@cwebber I feel that. Mine is normally "why is Vim freaking out" and it's almost always "somehow caps lock got turned on"

I gave myself a dedicated "Picard" button that I can reach over and hit any time a company tries to make me use their new LLM.

#StarTrek #TNG

Got one half of my tape deck working (and it's the recording side!) using extremely precise and carefully calibrated percussive maintenance (the motor relay was stuck, so I whacked it). Now listening to an old CrO2 tape that my dad apparently recorded at some point. The labels are clearly typed out with a type writer!

@whatzaname It's on https://en.wikiquote.org/

@flancian @edumerco @edsu @Matt_Noyes @mako @ntnsndr @dazinism I'd like to push back on "why not" as a reason to do anything. More specifically, I think we'll have different requirements depending on if this is for all users or just for a few working groups to use (I suspect if it's for all social.coop members as a service those requirements will be a superset of the requirements for if it's just us). We should decide what we want to do here and have a good reason for it up front IMO.

Okay fedi! A friend just brought up the idea of having a mutual-aid bicycle repair fund. Donations to it would be set aside to pay for repairs if someone couldn't afford it. I've seen this in coffee shops, but is this something other bike shops do? Is it only valid for some things and not others? Do you need to setup a separate entity for tax reasons? How do you manage such a thing? I'm very over-excited by this idea, and can't believe I've never even considered it! Ideas and suggestions please!

Finally broke down and got on Discord. It's every bit as trash I as I remembered, and I feel vaguely gross ethically, but I've just got to keep remembering that you have to meet the community where it's at and I can't selfishly expect the community to change just for me. The work of organizing is more important than my dislike of the tools that don't match our values.

That being said, I will be limiting my use to #IWW business only and will *not* be joining "just for fun" discord servers.

Update: Discord was even worse than I imagined and I deleted it again, but at least I can say I gave it a fair shot. I get that I'll never actually be helpful to any group because of this, but why in the world is anyone on this capitalist hellscape of a messenger?

Has there ever been a situation where the small community network allows the bigger commercial network to bridge, interface, etc. and it has resulted in the smaller community network growing and becoming a viable alternative the commercial one? I feel like I get in this argument every few weeks on fedi, and, to my knowledge, there are literally no examples of this happening ever. But I do want to be fair if I'm just wrong and they exist.

#AskFedi

@moira @ascentale for my part, I take the exact opposite stance: I suspect cross posting does the opposite and creates serious harm for the people of the fediverse by creating "too big to fail" instances that can't be moderated appropriately, and providing them with a path to embrace-extend-extinguish us. I'm strongly against bridges to corporate social media in general and would caution us from defaulting to assuming they're helpful. That said, I also have no proof that they're doing this here.

@tim @arnoldboer somewhere in the depths of my feed I have a post where I was thinking something similar. How this would be organized is an interesting question; would it be a union of anybody against AI? A union of users of a specific service? A union of users who agree to use some version of open source and pressure companies to open source stuff or pay for the open source they use by getting employee unions to coordinate with them?

@ATLeagle now that's a new years tradition I can get behind! Maybe I'll walk over to WaHo instead of boiling these black eyed peas (I'm all about the collards and corn bread, but black eyed peas were always my least favorite pea…)

@ascentale @moira I love the original Buffalo bicycles, but I didn't know they'd done an update. The dual chain thing makes sense to me, though I'd worry about the availability of parts: when you wear down that chainring, where do you get another one with whatever weird setup that has?

I have worked on a few shaft-drive bicycles and, though I really liked them, I always felt the same about those (too hard to find replacement parts).

#BikeNite

@epilanthanomai @dixon oh dang, I have worked at Cloudflare, they are possibly one of the *worst* companies about this. I have watched them put a junior dev on a new security critical product and had product managers tell me to not worry about protecting customers or how the product will affect them, just get shit done fast. Do not recommend. This was the start of me leaving tech.

@ridetheory @nocontexttrek similarly…

@slothrop count me in. I have some (limited) BikeCAD experience and am happy to help out with designs and sizing if I can raise the money to get a full license at some point. Also building experience and can braze a test frame when we get there.

I had completely forgotten about this show until today, but I *loved* "Gullah Gullah Island!" as a kid. I had zero awareness of what it was about or its importance in that regard, but even just hearing the name before reading about the show again made me stop and realize that it was obviously about more than some fun puppets. As a white kid in a conservative household, that was completely lost on me at the time.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/dec/23/gullah-gullah-island-geechee-tv-show

Is there a word for the fallacy where someone says "I'm just being neutral" or whatever as an argument for their specific political view? I wrote "neutrality fallacy" without thinking, but I feel like there's an actual name for it that's on the tip of my tongue and that the obvious thing isn't actually it.

Shit posting and jokes about CEO killing's aside, I generally don't think individual acts of political violence work most of the time (not that I'm against them as a rule of thumb, but generally speaking) and that community building is the real answer.

Once you've built community other strategies, including sabotage and private property destruction, are probably more effective than violence against people, and lead to better outcomes afterwards if you win.

I've had a draft on the back burner for a while comparing the Luddite revolution of the 19th century to the IWW-led strikes of the 20th century and how breaking private property was a key strategy in both, and how they both fell apart only after violence against people was brought up. I'm not sure what the 21st century example would be, maybe not having a large labor movement anymore means there isn't one. I still can't quite get my thoughts together and haven't gotten very far on this.