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re: matrix.kescher.at shutdown 

@kescher Tangential question: what moderation features are you missing that you feel Matrix should have had?

(Asking because I'm still working on a protocol fork, and I'd like to get this right from the start)

like trans folks, there are way more plural folks around than you realise

like, actually, but also as a joke since we're kinda by definition more folks than you realise

re: cryptocurrency, but more generally 

@AFriendlyBeagle (Also, none of this is *really* relevant to the point I was making originally, anyway.)

re: cryptocurrency, but more generally 

@AFriendlyBeagle I am well aware of all of this - and I have been around usecases like this (often activism-related) for a long time.

The thing that often gets missed, however, is what we had *before* Bitcoin. Because before Bitcoin, there was already an industry of anonymous/"risky" payments that *didn't* use cryptocurrency. Often it was more accessible to people than cryptocurrency is today.

Some examples included UKash, PaySafeCard, Liberty Reserve, and so on. These were absolutely not without their problems, and they were absolutely run by sketchy people, but they fulfilled the exact same requirements as Bitcoin, just without the destruction of climate and communities.

But the hype around Bitcoin ate basically all of them, and now you need to deal with privacy-invasive cryptocurrency exchanges instead of just buying a giftcard in a local shop, like you used to be able to.

Anonymous payments did not start with cryptocurrency, and I would argue that the diversity of them was actually another victim of the cryptocurrency hype.

So this is what I need to find:

- an on screen keyboard that works with Arrow Key + Enter navigation (to be used with a USB Remote without an airmouse.)

- a wifi configuration utility that is entirely navigable with arrow keys + enter + escape (with OSK for text entry.) Ideally something that can run in a terminal.

- ... I think that's it. If I can find solutions for those two things, I can probably whip up a prototype this afternoon.

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cryptocurrency, but more generally (2) 

"But then how do we make sure that people can eat and don't become homeless, if we can't do monetization?"

Hi! Welcome to the anti-capitalist movement! Let's get to work.

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@JennyFluff Someone was definitely looking for an excuse to use the phrase "spontaneous combustion" there :D

GenAI, NaNo meta 

A quick thought on the "criticism of generative AI is classist and ableist" bs, and why it's so fuckin' insidious:

Yes, those are genuine issues. AI is not a meaningful solution to *any* of them.

The solution to "there aren't enough non-English speaking/disabled/working class voices being published" is not and *never will be* "here's an ethically abhorrent tool that fundamentally reshapes marginalised voices into the statistical mean voice of those already published"

cryptocurrency, but more generally 

Now that the cryptocurrency hype has largely died down, maybe this will finally be the right time to say this:

The lesson from cryptocurrency ruining everything it touched, wasn't just "cryptocurrency is bad". The other lesson is that making something *about* money, of *any* kind, is the fastest way to stamp out any kind of healthy community dynamics and turn it into a race-to-the-bottom.

If you start your project by focusing on "monetization" as the goal, it will never become an enjoyable place for people to be. You cannot "monetize" your way out of a capitalist society. That people need to pay the bills, doesn't change this.

@cynicalsecurity short answer: yes
daemonising is, as a concept (forking into background), essentially incompatible with go runtime model, which implements its own M:N threading and uses OS threads rather loosely, and it's trivial to end up in a situation where the process would already have some threads started before it would reach your daemonizing code.

long answer: still yes, but daemonizing is bad anyway.
as a preface, the following is coming from being burned in many ways by processes attempting to drop privileges and daemonizing on their own. most often by silent failures with nothing on stdout/stderr/logs; but sometimes by leaking/retaining elevated privileges when they weren't supposed to.

self-daemonising is surprisingly difficult to do properly in general, arguably maybe even impossible if your code is anything but a statically linked executable directly interfacing with the kernel syscall interface (not even going through libc) because of how many things happen before "your" code is reached in process lifetime.
i've seen services dropping privileges improperly too often to trust just about any service to do so, regardless of what programming language they're written in, and instead i strongly prefer to have a service manager that would setup proper environment (privs dropped, etc etc) first, and then start the service.
if nothing else, there's less security sensitive code to audit, and it's in just one place, instead of having a myriad variations, with every service author implementing their own slightly different way of doing things.

And we're talking a fairly significantly-sized company here, this is absolutely not a sole developer or even a small team

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Every time someone claims that "perpetual refactoring" for quality is not a viable software development strategy in a Real Business(tm), I think about this one customer I have, which quietly does exactly this, and has been profitably doing it for years, and now has some of the most maintainable and reliable code I've ever seen at any company or frankly any software project

@kescher I vividly remember past attempts at running ArchiveTeam stuff on Azure (using trial credits) many many years ago, and the disk I/O was somehow worse than the shitty down-half-of-the-time oversold $2 VPSes that everybody made fun of.

"Well you should be using the managed database, not the local filesystem", I was told by Azure 'experts'.

I appreciate the modern world where sending my lawyer an email containing nothing other than 👍is an entirely reasonable thing to do

fucked up world where having a brain with exceptional pattern recognition and situational awareness plus the ability to absorb knowledge about completely unfamiliar and dissimilar topics like a sponge, synthesize unconventional ideas and solutions from it, and laser-focus on a task indefinitely if it’s immediately rewarding is a serious disadvantage and considered a disorder rather than a highly sought-after trait on the job market

@deBaer @jon This is nonsense. Reliable high-power connectors have been widely available for decades *and are used in most other powertools*. Those use spring contacts for a reason. The problem you're describing does not exist.

1000 richest people are approched. "The end of the world is here. Time to go to your doomsday bunker", they are told. The billionaires nodded. They knew this was coming. They were prepared.

So they gathered their loved ones and locked themselves in luxury bunkers. No contact to outside world.

10 years later they emerge. The world has healed. The air is breathable, people are happy. "What was the catastrophy?" they ask the first person they meet.

She screams: "THEY GOT OUT!!!"

#microfiction

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