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This thought brought to you by me thinking back to a piece of malware 20+ years ago that called itself "the game", and that upon execution would backdoor the system and start fucking with it

Changing your desktop background to distorted versions of images on your system, trying to creep you out, causing various parts of the system to glitch, only to after X days inform you that its work was done and delete itself

I never was able to figure out where this came from, or what it was, nobody I've talked to about it seems to recognize it

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Was just reminiscing about how malware used to be occasionally creative and interesting in the earlier days of computers

Now everything is either a cryptocurrency miner, ransomware, or some other hyper-optimized capitalist enterprise

Capitalism ruins everything, even malware

re: food, vegan 

Gotta give it to alpro, though, this is one of the most impressive "technically correct in a really annoying way" solutions I've seen to this problem so far 🙃

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food, vegan 

I *so* want to see this go to court, just to see the dairy lobby hopelessly try and argue their way out of this one

(It's not allowed to be called 'milk' here, because of lobby)

A month ago I found a cute meme on the internet that I thought would look excellent on my office wall. The bottom of the image said “National Park Service” and some quick image searches found it was originally from the nationalparkservice Instagram account, part of a promotional series to encourage park safety. But Instagram resizes things for the web. So, of course, I did what any internet weirdo would do; I filed a DOI FOIA request for the original artwork. Today the DOI found it for me!

Matrix protocol stuff 

The question of "how do I encode a video file for Matrix" has now been asked and answered several times and honestly this feels like a failure of the protocol, end users should not need to care about this...

From the desk of Understanding the Systems that keep you Alive
🌱🚜🚛🏪🍽️

If you appreciate somebody's work, like their kid, value their friendship, learned a lot from that thing they wrote, or whatever, for heaven's sake, tell them. I've gotten two really kind emails out of the blue in the past couple weeks, and the people who wrote them have no idea how huge those tiny glimmers of light are to me in this shitty, painful year. Say thanks! Tell people exactly how they're great, preferably in writing!

Wow another reason to use @tenacity instead of Audacity

Audacity is promoting """AI""" """features"""

audacityteam.org/blog/openvino

Edit: Sorry, I thought that stuff was built-in cause of an article I read, they're just linking to some plugins, but it's still really iffy IMO

@drahardja @bumblebeedc I was early in my it career in the 90s. But in my experience working in financial and telecommunications it at the time, even by 1994-1995, industry hardware and software companies, academia, and even governmental oversight was already happening to find and address Y2K issues in US and nascent Internet infrastructure by then.

By Christmas and New Year's 1999 transitioning to 2000 it was still somewhat stressful. Nobody knew for certain that nearly everything had been addressed. I personally volunteered to take the overnight shift as technical lead/project manager so the rest of my team could enjoy the holiday (and incidentally setting the example for other managers at the private bank where I worked at the time). We had a couple hiccups based solely on some preventable human error from other managers getting nervous and blinking against the psychological stress. But nothing actually broke because of uncaught technical failures.

Everyone, in total, across almost all technical, automated industries had done well, addressing and changing technical and procedural issues in time to make the actual chronological transition a piece of cake. But it had been the fruition of a lot of care and effort. Everyone at the time understood that.

@drahardja there is a distressing tendency to reward those who respond to a disaster, while ignoring those who do the difficult work of preventing a disaster. The latter is so much harder to see, and also so much more challenging...

refers to parental abuse (violence) and downplaying thereof 

every now and then I will hear something along the lines of "These days kids can't even be hit without everyone making a fuss, I was hit as a child and it didn't do me any harm"

and each time, I think, actually, it did do you harm. it made you think it's fine to hit children.

Question for Mastodon Admins: are you using the `REDIS_NAMESPACE` configuration variable?
If yes, can you reply and explain why you are using it?

We will need to drop support for it, as Sidekiq no longer supports it, and I want to be certain we understand every usage to prepare a migration guide.

#mastoadmin

"office revolution" :blobcatsurprised:
"the new office chair" :blobcatglaredrink:

goddamn neolibs and their fucking appropriation of language

Long covid is lichamelijk en zit 'niet tussen de oren', toont onderzoek aan - nos.nl/l/2503701

Why capitalism is a fundamentally violent ideology 

The ideology of capitalism is to create a social hierarchy through wealth disparity; you get to the top by having more wealth than others.

Capitalists will always try to privatize basic needs and infrastructure, because those are the most reliable way to extract wealth; you always have to buy them, whether you want to or not.

And if you satisfy those needs without buying them, police will show up to evict you for not paying rent, arrest you for "stealing" food, and so on. If you resist them, violence will be used against you, to force your hand.

This means that there is a direct line from capitalist ideology to state violence; it cannot work without that. Capitalism *must* be violent to exist.

And sure, there are a couple ways to reduce these issues through eg. regulation - but crucially, every single one of those ways *goes against* capitalist ideology.

So "making capitalism work" through regulation is a very strange concept; you're "making it work" by removing it from the equation, by actively working against it.

By that point, isn't it just time to acknowledge that capitalism is violent and undesirable?

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