Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

Reminder today, a joke isn’t funny unless both people feel it is harmless and funny. If only one person finds it funny, congratulations. It’s no longer a fun joke, it's rude and upsetting. Keep this in mind and do your best to keep things harmless, because others may not find things as funny as you do

I was at the pub with friends today and mentioned that I was not buying clothes for a year because I'm in mourning for my dad.

(See Chabad's explainer on this: https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/281616/jewish/The-Twelve-Months-of-Aveilus-in-Judaism.htm )

They were shocked. What if my underwear all suddenly met with disaster? Would I just go without (under)pants?

I'm reform, so I could just buy new pants, but what I would probably do is get somebody else to buy pants and "borrow" them.

What then, they wanted to know if the point? Why do this at all?

To which I say: it's custom and it's how I'm mourning and if it doesn't sound like Christianity, then baruch Hashem because Christianity fucking sucks at death, grief and mourning.

But also, yes, there's a loophole. But it's not a mindless get out clause. If I take a loophole, I need to have a conversation with somebody I care about that's going to involve acknowledgement of grief.

The technicalities can be dealt with, but this requires some amount of thought. Of being aware. Of being mindful. Of acknowledging that although it's been several months, this loss is still new.

Of having a year where I don't have to pretend things are normal and everything is fine. Of being in some ways stuck in a moment of catastrophe, several months ago. This weird singularity in my life, at the end of his.

I would like to thank Jia Tan for authoring the best CTF challenge of the past decade.

tech companies donate their april fools’ day joke budget to open source maintainers challenge 2024

My favorite Ren Faire story:

I knew a guy who kept a Starfleet insignia pinned to the inside of his garb. A few times per season, some folks would come to the Faire cosplaying as a Star Trek landing party, investigating a “primitive” world.

He would take them aside, show his insignia, and identify himself as a Starfleet officer on a cultural research mission. He’d call them out for breaking the Prime Directive and ruining his research. Then he’d demand to know what ship they’re from, and threaten to get them court martialed if they didn’t change into something less conspicuous.

i don’t blame google or social media i blame walking talking context collapse machines making it impossible to say anything ever because someone Famous might see it and share it with a million random people

Something I tweeted a few years ago:

April Fool’s Day can be saved with ONE SIMPLE TWEAK: instead of fooling people, make it about playing the fool. Actually do silly things rather than pretending you’re doing a silly thing

We should adopt this nixpkgs RFC as soon as possible!

@solarpunk2050 rebellion doesn't need to be throwing Molotovs, it can be constantly asking if what we are doing is right. It can be trying to find a better way to do something. It means being actively involved in your community and asking if we are not forgetting anyone, even if they don't speak up. There is always a place for such a dynamic in a Better World.

If you cannot imagine it, that only shows how hard the current culture limited your horizons.

I find it very interesting to observe who describes Andres Freund as a "Microsoft engineer", vs. who describes them as a "PostgreSQL developer".

I feel like it tells you a lot about what someone values more - what someone actually does in society, vs. what their assigned role is in the hierarchy.

It looks like libexpat is in trouble, and needs help from experienced C developers: https://github.com/libexpat/libexpat/blob/R_2_6_2/expat/Changes#L8-L31

What you can do:
- If you're an experienced C developer, and can commit to helping maintain it, reach out to them. I expect that they're mainly looking for long-term collaborators, not just one-off contributions.
- If not, pass it on to people you know who might be able and interested to help out.

(Note that I'm not in contact with them - I'm just passing on the message!)