why is computer bad?
10% -- computer is hard! (interesting)
30% -- computer is hard! (tedious)
60% -- if computer is not made to bend in every which way to make rich people richer at all times at the expense of literally everything else we will literally kill you

Happy #BlackHistoryMonth !

I'm still not ready to talk about Black history. I want to talk about white US history.

Q: "Why don't Black people build any generational wealth? Newer immigrant groups seem to be doing just fine? Must be a lazy and shiftless people!"

A: Because for most of US history, white folk have *intentionally* destroyed the wealthiest Black neighborhoods in the US and stolen all the wealth.

Greenwood. Allentown. Seneca Village. Rosewood. Freedmen's town.

1/N

#BlackMastodon

@bkuhn @jannem Do you know if you can adjust the acceleration curves in software? If you change it so the force needed to overcome the initial friction is higher you may be able to make it so bumping the pointer while typing doesn't move the mouse at all at the expense of requiring a bit of extra force when you do want to move the mouse.

@bkuhn Did you read that column by Charlotte Cowles where she put $50,000 cash in a shoe box, taped it shut, and handed it to an "undercover CIA agent" that pulled up in front of her apartment in a random SUV?

She was (is still?), and I am not making this up, The Cut's financial advice columnist.

@postmodern A few FOSS projects I use are on Discord and I use it with friends as well. My biggest complaints are (1) the search is terrible and (2) managing multiple accounts -- one for private stuff, one for public stuff -- is difficult/impossible.

Some servers I've come across require manual post-join approval to access anything but welcome/rules channels which is also pretty annoying.

The two hardest problems in Computer Science are:

1. Getting up in the morning
2. Going to bed at a reasonable time

it's truly amazing what LLMs can achieve. we now know it's possible to produce an html5 parsing library with nothing but the full source code of an existing html5 parsing library, all the source code of all other open source libraries ever, a meticulously maintained and extremely comprehensive test suite written by somebody else, 5 different models, a megawatt-hour of energy, a swimming pool full of water, and a month of spare time of an extremely senior engineer

(1/7) I suppose #Fediverse isn't the place people are discussing #RobReiner. But after 36 hours of deliberating whether to say anything, I feel compelled. This thread will be long,but I start w/ most important part:

It's an “open secret” in the #FOSS community that in March 2017 my brother murdered our mother. About 3k ppl/year in USA have this experience, so it's a statistical reality that someone else in FOSS experienced similar. If so, you're welcome in my PMs to discuss if you need support…

@bkuhn @kevin I've never had a problem with users who provision their own hardware naming it how they want. The only consistency in SFC laptop names are the ones I installed, which are named after fruit that grows on trees because I thought fit the existing scheme well enough.

At my previous job, where I was but one small cog in an enormous, lumbering, dysfunctional IT machine built from the ashes of teams from various M's & A's, the machines were named after

1. The 3 letter code of the nearest airport, though I think they really meant nearest airport that normal people would have heard of, eg CVG but not LUK and definitely not ISZ.

2. The os abbreviated to 1 letter. I don't know if they used m or o for Mac os.

3. 2-4 letters for function, eg db, dc, web, mail

4. A 2 digit number starting at 01, to be used in the event of collisions.

ordldb02 was always my example of how absurd it was.

I told them, frequently and at great length, how awful this was system was. I think it must have been started by network admins somewhere (back when the 0s were free but you needed to smash rocks together to get 1s). Fortunately it was not strictly enforced unless you needed it to be properly blessed by TPTB.

(Or if you, *cough*, found the one PTB that agreed with you and made friends).

Kid in the Hall Scott Thompson is a TERF.

@bkuhn Wow, I haven't thought about Service Merchandise in a very long time. I was always disappointed I couldn't watch the conveyor belt for longer.

Ah, here's that original post! Or at least a screenshot of someone else posting it...