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"Everyone is welcome! Details on Instagram!"

Which is it? Everyone is welcome or only for people with Instagram accounts?

Today, A bunch of automatic employees have published posts in their personal blogs and social accounts defending what Matt Mullenweg is doing against WP Engine.

A blind post on the automattic subforum, plus some individual accounts like it can be seen in the screencap below, say Matt is rounding up employees and asking them to publicly defend the company or hand out their resignation.

I can't verify this, I haven't been told directly, but I've seen several unrelated people confirming it's happening.

To my ex coworkers, if you see this, know that the press is very interested in what is going on and they would be more than happy to talk with you privately.

systemd, unix philosophy 

My problem with all these treatises on how software that "does a lot of things" is bad and more likely to fail, like frequently comes up in systemd discussions, is that while it is true in the abstract, these arguments never seem to account for things that people actually need to interact with.

Sure, it works great for libraries! Tiny libraries make for a very nice development experience and, with some reasonable dependency policies, very reliable and maintainable codebases. But that's because your target audience are *developers*; it's their *job* to pick the right tool for the job.

Your typical end user isn't a developer. They do not have the time or energy to allocate to painstakingly evaluate a "stack" of tools for every little thing they want to do.

They are looking to have a single program, a single UI, a single point of interaction with a coherent mental model, that allows them to complete their task from start to end. Where they can assume that the steps integrate, and they probably won't run into trouble on the common path.

And systems built to the "Unix philosophy" are notoriously bad at this! They are developed more or less in isolation - that is the point - and so they all have slightly different interaction modes, that are tailored to the specific task that the tool is meant to address. They may or may not integrate out of the box. If you're not a developer, this _sucks_.

So yes, by all means, modularize your libraries. Modularize your packages. Modularize every bit of internals you have! But don't try to universally apply the "Unix philosophy" to every piece of software without recognizing that *this is not actually what end users want to interact with*.

If you want your thing to actually be usable by people who aren't nerds, it *needs* to be usable through an application that does more than one thing. And this applies to anything a regular user might need to interact with directly; yes, including a service/system manager.

And if you insist that it is only a low-level tool, and people are expected to build end-user tools on top of that, then you actually need to make sure that it has a workable, reliable and consistent API to build against. None of this "custom string format you need to parse" crap.

(And yes, there are legitimate criticisms to be made of systemd governance. But "it doesn't follow the Unix philosophy" without further qualification is just about the worst argument you could be supporting it with.)

wordpress, WP Engine 

Going from what I've seen, and especially what either party *isn't* saying, I can really only conclude that both parties are the asshole in this whole thing.

@gsuberland The best part is all the source code they released which wasn't theirs...

mutual aid post, please help 

i am preparing to put the evacuation plan i have been preparing all these months and collecting donations for in motion in the very near future, but i am not sure if i can hold out for long. the money will last me several months, maybe a year max, but after that i will need to find a full time job to afford living. but if i find it, i will drop out of uni and the army draft will come after me. pls help me what do i do

#mutualaid #Mastodon4Harris #MastodonForHarris

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Dutch politics, protest rights 

In case you missed it, far-right parties in the Netherlands, who are in power, have increasingly been pushing to abolish the right to protest, despite constitutional rights.

This blog post captures much of my annoyance with recent events in the Fedisphere, but the thread below it really drives home the point.

deadsuperhero.com/2024/09/swf-

#women #BlackMastodon #SocialMedia #microaggressions #MentalHealth

'A new study finds that microaggressions aimed at Black women online appear to harm the health of other Black women who see those microaggressions – even though the microaggressions are not aimed at them personally. Specifically, researchers found that encountering vicarious microaggressions was associated with worse sleep quality for young Black women.'

news.ncsu.edu/2024/09/microagg

UPDATE: body doubling success! thank you friends, i had a lovely day seeing your faces and got a lot done. i'll do it again in the future, so keep an eye out for it!

---

Anyone want to body double on video chat today??? I am tired and need task lubricant.

Stuff we can do:

chat throughout any of the below
both work on stuff
you do house chores while i work
you hang out while i work
you do crafts while i work
show-and-tell
silence for focusing during any of the above

A spaceship landed in the park. A door dilated and an alien stepped out.

"Greetings, Earthlings! You may recall we landed here not long ago, and asked to meet your leaders."

The alien paused.

"We met the Earthlings you indicated. Very funny. Now, take us to your real leaders."

#MicroFiction #TootFic #SmallStories

marcellus williams and the absolute fucking ghoul responsible for his death aka parson 

That thing where all of your tasks are high priority and so you're frozen in the overwhelm of it all.

watching a video about how mild hearing loss is incredibly widespread and that loud recreational sound listening thru headphones is a big factor

and i can't help but feel like capitalist industrialization is such a huge, huuuuge factor in this that goes uncommented on because it's Just How Our World Is Now

i wouldn't need to use active noise canceling to listen to my podcasts on a normal ear-healthy volume out on a walk if there weren't cars & jackhammers in my city, except maybe during summer when the cicadas get in the mood ig

Dear Game Devs,

Please please please let me access the options/settings as soon as the game loads.

Don't make me sit through a prologue, or intro, or tutorial of any kind. Just let me adjust the audio/graphics/accessibility options ASAP and then I'll look at all of your fun informative stuff, I swear.

On my knees,
Syl

In 1999 to 2000 I was going through a very rough patch in my life. In the span of a few years, I'd gotten married, lost a parent, birthed a child, gotten divorced, changed careers, and relocated 3,000 miles away from everything and everyone I knew. What with the state of things, I didn't get to see #GalaxyQuest when it was first released.

Finally, on a day I was feeling particularly low, and shortly before the movie left the theaters, I canceled work and took myself out to a midday matinée.

I was the *only* person in a vast theater, of a size that no one builds anymore, sitting and waiting for the lights to go down. At one point, I turned and peered up at the projectionist's booth. I saw a shadowy figure moving back and forth behind the window, bending and straightening. This was in the days before automated, digital films. The Phantom Menace had been released digitally in 1999, but the equipment to show such films was extremely expensive and most theaters hadn't converted yet; "projectionist" was still a real job.

While I was looking, the figure paused, strode to the window and peered back at me, then disappeared quickly.

I turned back around and continued to fidget and ponder the misfit pieces of my life.

At the top of the aisle behind me, the theater door swung open and banged loudly on the wall. The projectionist strode down the aisle toward me, a tall barrel-shaped man with a thick beard and glasses. My first thought was that the matinee was canceled due to low turnout, and I'd be getting a refund. Just as I'd resigned myself to that, the marching projectionist shouted out in a booming voice,

"WELCOME to your PRIVATE viewing oooooooof GALAXY QUEST!!!"

He stopped in front of my row, and I saw that he had an *armload* of STUFF. One by one, he began presenting each thing to me, and as the pile in his arms dwindled, the one in my lap grew.

"As our SPECIAL VIP Galaxy Quest GUEST today, YOU are entitled to..."

"- A commemorative t-shirt!"
"- A poster suitable for framing!"
"- A limited edition refrigerator magnet!"
"- A button to pin to your lapel!"

The list and the shwag went on. With every ridiculous item, I laughed harder and harder, until there were tears leaking out of the corners of my eyes.

Then he bowed and shouted, "WE HOPE YOU ENJOY THE SHOW!" and turned on his heel to march back up the aisle and out the exit door.

Alas, of all the shwag only the magnet has stood the test of time. But the humor and kindness of the unknown projectionist lives on.

#storytelling

We've been trying out a portable induction stove as an extra 'burner', and uh, the small pan we have vibrates off the stove when it's turned on 🙃

This is not a failure mode I expected...

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