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Before discussing politics, I like to administer The Test.

The Test is simple, and should be easy to pass:

"Which is more important:
1. Human Rights
2. Property Rights"

There is one unambiguous, simple, correct answer. If they fail The Test, I don't talk politics with them.

"Not every corporation!" they said, as every FOSS project with an LLC behind it continuously explodes in a fireworks show for the ages

There's these competing beliefs, "turn your hobby into a job and you'll never work a day in your life" vs. "turn your hobby into a job and you'll never enjoy it again"...

And I think I've finally worked out where the disconnect is: it's all about the agency you have in your work. Whether one or the other is true depends on whether you can make a living doing the thing you wanted to do anyway, or whether you're dragged along in a maelstrom of industry misery.

By this point I feel pretty safe concluding that for me and tech, it's mostly the latter, especially in more recent years.

programmer culture lamenting, "jokes" 

So there's that Wat talk by Gary Bernhardt. Pretty funny, I felt at the time it came out - not something to take seriously, of course, just something to blow off some steam.

And then I noticed people starting to take it seriously. It started coming up in discussions, as if it were a legitimate argument about a language being 'bad'. It started being used to attack programmers writing in those languages, and question their competence.

And then Gary Bernhardt himself, the speaker in that talk, turned out to be somewhat of a language-elitist ass.

Since then I've taken a rather more grim view of these kind of overly simplified 'jokes' about programming languages. Because it turns out, they mostly punch down, and quite often they're not really jokes at all, they're just someone looking for an excuse to talk down on others.

The place I'm staying has a pond nearby so I went out this morning to check things out. Lots of wildlife out there.

Finally something good to report about Firefox: the new tab groups feature works well for me!

🇬🇧I can't recommend the EU-funded DNS service #DNS4EU because access is logged. When you override warnings to access "harmful websites" they even log your IP address. techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-

There are government-free services that do not log: privacyguides.org/en/dns

Update: I understand now the IP address is kept for 24 hours to prevent the confirmation prompt from showing again.

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dripping with sarcasm 

@joepie91 leadership with massive ambitions, underserved confidence, and an inability to listen to their community? wow, this is a completely unique situation and we could not have seen this coming

TIL dat iemand in de familie Buwalda ooit zelf een achtbaan heeft gebouwd, en dat die nu rondreist op de Belgische en Franse kermis

(De familie Buwalda runt al die identieke kermisbaantjes in Nederland)

And yeah I've definitely stopped being polite or friendly about this shit, the people in question have had plenty of opportunity and offers of assistance to turn things around, so now all you get is complaining

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(To clarify, there were definitely people involved in Matrix years ago who *did* recognize these issues. But they weren't the ones with the power to change things)

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Just fucking admit that you fucked up for once, cowards, and then we can start *actually honestly* talking about the reforms needed to keep this ship from sinking

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