Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Hey #biology, #laboratory, fedi where can I get 2-5% Sodium Hypochlorite solution without any fragrances in it. I have an allergy to lavender and its in most masking or scenting fragrances. I know most people just get bleach from the store but I can't because of this.

#Trauma doesn’t make people stronger.
It damages their nervous system.
It hijacks their digestive tract.
It keeps the person in a constant loop of hypervigilance.
To tell someone they are stronger because of trauma is to deny what it has cost them to survive.

Ok, here’s my first IT Horror Story of the Saturday night. It's a bit long.

I was at a client, a healthcare facility, to replace some hard drives. They didn’t want to spend money, so we had to keep the current setup running, which was outdated and unreliable.
Now I can say it: they didn’t want to spend because the general manager’s goal was to give work to a company of his friends, who were already providing support on two VMs, and he wanted to hand everything over to them. The IT manager hadn’t yet understood the financial interests of these people and still believed everything was in good faith, that they really didn’t have the funds. We were holding everything together with duct tape, but it was working and stable. I had set up a "cluster" with OpenNebula and GlusterFS for storage (later replaced with MooseFS and then with Ceph), using all available hardware.

We scheduled an intervention and notified everyone to disconnect and shut down the machines by 12:30. By 13, we had completed the backups, aiming to start the intervention by 14 and get the work up and running by 15:30. The goal was to update the systems and check the disks. We shut down all the VMs, had everyone disconnect. It was lunchtime.
We updated the servers, rebooted them. One of the disks started throwing errors. GlusterFS, for some reason I never really investigated (I have my theories, which I’ll share later, but from that day forward, GlusterFS no longer exists for me), decided to overwrite both that disk and its replica with zeros. I hadn’t changed anything.

Panic – there were backups, but on a USB 2 disk (old servers, no USB 3)! I immediately stopped everything. I was almost fainting. The IT manager didn’t understand what had happened, so I explained it to him. He announced to everyone that we would cancel the rest of the intervention, restore from backup, and have the work back up by 15:30 as planned, prioritizing the most critical VMs.

The "competing" company reached out. They had powered on one of their VMs and started "doing their own interventions." Even though they had been warned not to do anything. And they complained "we" had lost some of their data. Of course, the manager and those guys went "carpe diem": they put me under accusation, saying I had undoubtedly made a mistake that led to "lost data." I wrote a technical report explaining what I had seen, noting various SSH logins from those guys during the intervention. The "history" had been erased. Of course, not by me.

They continued to harass me for a while. The last thing they asked was for me to go to a meeting "to explain in person." They tried to schedule it the day before my wedding. And they knew it.

They threatened to ask me for an unspecified (high) financial compensation for 'the lost data.' What lost data? The ones that, allegedly, the other company would have entered in the meantime.

Final result: no problem for me (I hadn’t done anything wrong), the backups were fine, they only calmed down when I proved (logs in hand) that I wasn’t the only one connected to that machine, and my witnesses (two colleagues and the IT manager) had seen all my actions, confirming I hadn’t done anything wrong.

In the end: I realized they would do it again and I left the client – even the IT manager decided to resign and change jobs. The general manager managed to install, at astronomical figures, the company he wanted to place. After two months, they got their hands on the system and broke it. They asked me for assistance, which I refused. At any price.

After a few years, I found out that the general manager ended up in jail for corruption, bribes, and for favoring his friend companies in many sectors.

That day, I celebrated.

#HorrorStory #ITHorrorStory #ITSupport #TechTroubles #SysAdmin

One of those interesting ideas from a sci-fi novel that pops into my head a lot:

I don't remember which story it's from, but one scene was a character making a software program and how at that point (a few hundred years in the future) writing software was more akin to being an archeologist or historian than an engineer.

As in, by then, essentially every useful program had already been written and the challenge was finding what you needed buried in the collective knowledge of humanity.

I already think it's a terrible, irresponsible practice to organize in-person international conferences at the peak of "flu season".

Now imagine how I feel learning about follow-up conferences scheduled days after in adjacent countries, explicitly pitched to people who will have just finished attending the previous conferences.

If I could help people understand two things about being disabled - it would be:

We try everything. All our spoons go towards trying to get better/survive/adapt. Telling us to “try harder” is cruel.

It’s not fun asking for help. Most of us go to great lengths to avoid asking and retain as much independence and autonomy as we can.

If the “help” comes with strings & gaslighting … it’s not helpful.

Good morning or afternoon or evening or night everyone, depending on your timezone! Holiday announcement time!

As we do every year, we'll be taking a chunk of December off from work. This year, our cheeky little holiday will be from the 12th of December up to and including the 2nd of January.

What does that mean, you ask? During that time, we'll make the Matrix help, general, and code channels read-only, and we'll make the Github repository read-only as well. This means that during our holiday period, you won't be able to create issues or pull requests or ask us questions.

We do this to give us time to relax, enjoy quality time with friends and family, play video games, eat gingerbread, drink tea, and pet our various animals, in order to recharge our batteries for the year ahead without worrying about new issues coming in.

This doesn't mean that development work will completely stop for the duration of the holiday, just that the "user-facing" side of the development work will pause, as this is the part that we find drains our nerd batteries the fastest. We are, after all, computer-touching hermits.

So there! It's been a great year for GoToSocial in our opinions, and we're looking forward to working on cool new shit for you all (and for ourselves) in 2025, once we're raring to go again after a break. Thanks for reading! Now pet the sloth:

xoxoxoxo #GoToSocial devs

Doctor: "you definitely have clinical burnout."
Me: "Oh man. Well, how long is that going to take to fix, because I've got a _lot_ of stuff that needs doing."
Doctor: …
Me:
Me: what?

@mcc I did an internship in a recording studio where I learned one day they had five (5) identical vacuum cleaners.

I asked what's up with this and the owner said "I did the research, these are the best vacuum cleaners, so I bought five which should last me a lifetime without ever having look into it again or worry they stop making these."

I thought it was a bit wacky at the time, but I understand it more now.

Interesting proposition: *dont* keep pushing to ban an app that virtually half of the country uses regularly and has millions of small businesses and creators financial wellbeing tied to it without any plan for compensating for the economic impact it’ll have

conflict avoidance and the sentiment “never go negative” merely allow unprincipled pissants to move unhindered in your spaces. do you believe in a cohesive compassion or do you just want to make nice, never recognizing who is absent for who you allow?

i wonder how much of the decline in social group membership would be amended if we could measure people’s mmo guilds and d&d groups

conversely, it would be cool to see how many of those do generally prosocial things like more old timey associations used to: charity drives, scholarships, etc.

in all seriousness, in the age of algorithmic feeds and playlists, I do miss the magic and intimacy of sharing the media you like with others

I was thinking about this earlier while remembering a time where most of my social interactions online were effectively shitposting about anime and video games, and regretting that I stopped that once I left university and started working

Remember kids, if someone asks you to sign something. *read it first!*

(we have a plumber currently trying to find out why his pad tried to charge us more than what was agreed to because I did)

"Purchase of article may be required"

*sigh* opens new sci-hub tab.

I can understand the emotion behind using words like "us as a species," "humanity," and "human nature." But with these words people also make a false equivalence of the perpetrators and the victims. These words erase the 90% of us struggling to survive under this hostile, death-making system, suffering premature deaths for the profits of a very small group of people.

Name the perpetrators, because it's them and the destructive systems that benefits them we need to fight.

#AntiFascism #AntiCapitalism #Capitalism #CapitalismKillsLife #ABetterWorldIsPossible #ClimateJustice #colonialism #StopWars #imperialism #LandBack #patriarchy #consumerism