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grumbling about Highrise City 

How do you make a city builder with lore focused around "sustainably growing cities to deal with increased centralized population" and... not have trains???

I think the Crowdstrike situation shows a similar failure mode as the supply chain problems during covid.
When things go well, there is a push for centralization in order to reduce costs, but this decreases resiliency.
The result is Crowdstrike taking down important services around the world, or half the internet going down whenever Cloudflare or AWS are down.
I think it would be more healthy to have systems be more diverse and stop trying to push everything to the cloud.

OH: “I just say random shit and it immediately gets posted on fedi!”

fedi meta 

@rune Ah. Yeah. I am... not impressed with the way stux runs their instances, to put it mildly. And the finances are not my primary concern there...

uncomfortable truth for anarchist computer folks 

You know that thing about how any system of hierarchy and power is eventually coopted, regardless of how good the intentions are, by authoritarians? And how it will turn into a system of oppression? And how that's fundamentally unavoidable on a long-enough timescale even with 'checks and balances'?

Yeah. You know how computer technology is structured, with only a few parties capable of manufacturing it, and most of society being centralized into a handful of different 'shapes' of computer system?

That's a system of power.

While this is not a call to 'abandon technology' or similar primitivist rhetoric, this is absolutely a thing you need to be thinking about long and hard as a tech anarchist.

Some weirdo writing a whole thread on “NULL pointer” [sic] after seeing a screenshot of a stacktrace with a read at 0x9c in what I have to assume is kernel memory. And then I see he’s a Xoogler and claims to be a “professional C++ programmer”.

The thread, which is the worst analysis of this as is possible, ends in sexism and racism. *this is my surprised face*

I need to Kotlin harder.

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funding idea for open data projects 

A long-standing problem with open data projects is that they are not free to run, but companies tend to heavily exploit the data for their own profit without providing any funding to the project, and any technical restrictions on that would also harm the legitimate users.

So here's an idea that just occurred to me: charge specifically for CSV and Excel exports. JSON/whatever exports and feeds are free and unrestricted, but CSV/XLS requires contributing to the project. Because as far as I can tell, 'business environments' are pretty much the only place where people would *willingly* choose CSV/XLS over standard(ish) serialization formats.

Delivery options, as someone with ADHD:

⚪️ Next day (extremely convenient)
⚪️ Two weeks (you will forget and be pleasantly surprised when it arrives)
⚪️ 3-4 days (you will be stuck in waiting mode, constantly checking the tracking information, unable to do anything until it arrives)

Fuck websites that start flashing fake 'notifications' for their intrusive live chat widget in the page title

@foone
Developer: "it works on my machine"
Manager: "yes, but we can't sell your computer to every customer"
Developer: "can't we?" [[SD card cloning intensifies]]

good lord. I pulled a microSD card out of a Raspi inside an IoT product and it appears they had some developer use a raspi to develop/test some software, and then they just yanked the SD card out of that machine and duped it on to all of their deployed products.

it's got .bash_history of the development process! there's git checkouts of private repos! WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS?

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