Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

TIL: Whatever #ebooks or documents you put on a #Kindle, they're being indexed & uploaded automatically to the #Amazon server if the device has an internet connection. Just found out with an unpublished #manuscript that someone wanted to read on their Kindle and it ended up on the Amazon server, although it was put onto the Kindle manually via cable. Whatever you do with Amazon devices, you're adding everything to Amazon's data collection. #Enshittification #AuthorRights #IntellectualProperty

I am happy to report that wap.orf.at is recreated in all its glory. including some imagemagick for article images!

something I wish I had learned much earlier in life is that if you are weird, trying to be buttoned-down and normal in spaces that aren't for being weird in might feel safe, but being fully weird signals to other people that you are safe for them to be weird around, which is more important

For anyone else in health insurance hell:

It happened *again*. After two years of polite phone calls every 2-3 months to my doctor and health insurance, the thing that got me unstuck was writing a polite email to the various CEOs documenting the delays, citing the state law requiring insurers to pay within 30 days, and asking for a written explanation as to why, 695 days later, they hadn't paid. Actual emails and phone calls from competent human beings within a week!

https://aphyr.com/posts/368-how-to-replace-your-cpap-in-only-666-days

The fact that Jessica after only a week of solitary confinement began showing signs of severe mental health effects is not surprising to me and is also a vindication of the concept of prison abolition.

occasionally i have some problem where i'm like. i think a llm would give me a good answer with less effort than finding it on the internet. and then i remember that the only reason that is true is because the search results are filled with llm generated results that spend 15 paragraphs not answering the question, and if none of that shit existed there would just be the thing i actually wanted, which is a html webpage that answers my question and has links to other places where i could learn more.

I prefer to leave the skin on for potato chips.

I keep seeing people ask why Americans haven't been protesting Trump. The thing is, we have been. It's just that "protesting" has been a toothless tactic in the US for a long time.

*News agencies are owned by the billionaires. They refuse to cover left wing protests in a positive light. They are either not covered or made to look belligerent.

*People don't know how to protest. Americans view it as asking lawmakers to do something based on the will of the people. Oftentimes, the ask isn't even clear. Other countries view it as "meet our specific demands or else we will do this specific thing to make your life hell."

*Branded organizers, like the Women's March, do not want to cause violence or even disruption. They get a permit from the city, a crowd goes there and shouts for a few hours before going home.

*Spontaneous protests like what we saw in 2020 after Breonna Taylor's murder are met with militarized police, sometimes even the National Guard. Best case scenario is getting arrested and released with a court date for the future. Keep in mind a record severely fucks up your ability to find a job and housing. Worst case scenario is the state using lethal force.

*Cops show up at small protests saying they're there to "keep the peace." That means they are there to protect the Nazis and right wingers. Cops started out as slave catchers and have continued to be allied with right wing extremists all this time. At the protest in Pikeville some years ago, the white supremacists where put in a gated area ("the Nazi pen") with cops guarding it. The cops faced away from the Nazis and toward the crowd of regular people there to protest.

*Speaking of which, there are armed MAGA chuds everywhere. You don't even have to be protesting to be in danger.

We are going up against a country who has 0 issues killing millions of its citizens by withholding healthcare, they do not give a fuck about protests that never make it to the "tear shit down and make the elite scared" stage.

"In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none." - Stokely Carmichael

Gods save me from people who engage in any human activity and want to keep politics out of it

if you're responsible for a FOSS project, it's now time to consider how you can run your project without relying on the US.

like, using GitHub is fine. Continue using it - I do, too, and there's a lot of value of having projects centralized in one place.

but you **need** to make sure you have a contingency plan. is your repo with all branches and metadata backed up somewhere else? do you own your project's website, discussion forums, or something else that allows you to point your users and contributors to a new place if you need to?

can you continue work on your project if US-big-tech decides your very existence is no longer allowed?

now is the time to take inventory and build backups.

Just in case, I suppose I don't know anyone who can help, or can reach out to someone who can help with Open Source compliance at Cisco, right?

periodic reminder that your language's standard library may have "join paths safely" and "join URL segments safely" functions, and you should use them

if it doesn't, and you're working with paths or URLs, you should write them and then use them

I am going to smack the next person who imposes a "this base URL/path must/must not have a slash on the end because we blindly concatenate it with a relative path that doesn't/does start with a slash" requirement on a configuration value

"Here are the illustrations for your history book," the artist said.

"Thanks, very g- Is this man using an iPod?"

"Very iconic of the early 21st."

"This is a history of the Post-Capitalism Neorenaissance, starting 2027! The iPod was outmoded then."

"It's centuries ago, who will notice?"

"Me!"

#TootFic #SmallStories #MicroFiction #vss