Before the vacay: extra stress to finish shit in time.

After vacay: extra stress to catch up.

Net relaxation: none

(Though I personally tried and recommend a “run out of fucks and end slow” / “be stingy with fucks and start slow” model)

Ich hab nachher den nächsten Termin zu einem Projekt das jetzt schon eine Ewigkeit drauf wartet, dass andere ihre Scheiße festmachen. Is okay, ich steh ja nur nachher wieder da und sag “joa, wird mit Q2 vermutlich doch nix”

I bet they’re gonna need money to stem that influx, and I’m worried where they’ll find it.

Half the marketing seems to be “Did you know the founder is a Palestinian?”

Yeah, cool, hope his background helps bring some light on the atrocities being done 5o his kin. But when it comes to the app, he could be the first child to be born in Antarctica for all I care. Is the product any use?

Textbook example of “When a measure becomes a target, it is no longer a good measure” (if it ever was)

Hey nonprofiter, why do I still require your permission to address my anime website on my Japanese connection?

If you want Domain Names to be unique, you need some organ to coordinate that. Doesn’t have to be about permission, but if I use the same name as someone else, the URI is no longer U and loses all value.

That doesn’t have to be about permission. Ideally, any unclaimed domain could be claimed by anyone (with a possible exception for things like important government domains). You’d just need some organisation to keep a registry and mediate disputes when someone tries to claim that your domain is theirs and they’d like to have it redirect to their site.

What is the “public interest” in his view of “like-minded activists”

I can’t read their minds and haven’tread his book, but I’d say the rest makes it sound like they want to democratise it and harden it against corporate control. Why, do you have any indication to the contrary or are you just throwing accusations?

he didn’t design the web with the blindl in mind.

Isn’t that basically an implementation issue? Like, sure, text isn’t ideal for people who can’t read, but that hardly precludes using it to encode information that some other tools could turn into non-visual formats, nor does it prevent the development of other protocols designed for different content forms than text, as I’m sure you’re aware.

I know I had to learn a whole course about web content accessibility guidelines to make it as easy as possible for people with cognitive, visual or motoric impairments to navigate and use websites, including accommodation for tools like screen readers, making sure table columns and headers are unambiguously associated (even with things like floating headers when you scroll).

It’s not like the medium is actively hostile to blind people. It’s just that a discrete data storage and transmission formats lend themselves well to discrete information like symbols. I don’t know what more you would have expected of him.

I know he didn’t design the web with the silenced in mind.

Again, I’m not sure that’s an issue on part of the Web. Yes, HTTP by itself has no encryption (which HTTPS added later) or obfuscation of sender and recipient (which is a routing issue, not a content one), and DNS isn’t immune to censorship by providers selectively refusing to resolve certain domains they want to see blocked. At some level, there will always be the human factor.

But you’re just sounding like “He didn’t perfectly account for everything, so he’s an elitist fuck who hates freedom”. By that metric, literally every human is a piece of shit, because none of us are perfect, which makes it a useless metric.

I know he didn’t he design the web with kilobytes in mind.

Okay now you’re taking the piss.

where is Tim’s OpenNic TLD?

Idk, how should I know? But also, why would he need one? Is using one particular service a requirement for championing its cause? Should he have one just to show it off?

Or should he, you know, spend his time and energy trying to raise awareness and devising a way to unfuck things, however and whyever it got fucked up?

Or is he nor pure enough?

I’m vaguely on the periphery of a project to create a sort of info-hub chat-bot. The project lead was really enthusiastic about getting me on board and helping me develop my skills in that direction.

Apparently there’s a lot of people calling the wrong departments about stuff. Think along the stereotype of people calling the IT “Help Desk” for a broken light. The bot should help them find the right info, or at least the right department.

The issue, according to management, is that information is spread all over the place. Some departments use Confluence, others maintain pages on the intranet webserver. One has their own platform for FAQ and tickets, except it’s not actually for tickets any more, which you’ll only find out when they unhelpfully close your ticket with that remark. Wanna guess what confused users do? Right, call some other department.

The obvious solution would be getting each department to be more transparent and consistent about their information, responsibilities and ways to reach them, possibly even making them all provide their info on some shared knowledgebase with a useful search function. But that would require people to change their stuck habits.

So instead they develop a bot supposed to know all the knowledgebases and access them for users, answer simple queries, point them the right way for complex ones and potentially even help them raise tickets with the relevant departments. Surely, that will improve things?

The one time I tried it, I asked it a question that would have been my area of responsibility to see if people would actually find me or at least the general department. Yeah, nah, it pointed me at someone not just unrelated to that function or department, but also responsible for a different geographical area. IDK what they trained it on, but it probably didn’t include any mentions of that topic, which is fair, given it’s still in development.

But instead of saying “I have no information on that” or direct me to a general contact, it confidently told me to do the thing it’s supposed to fix: bother the wrong person.

And the project lead wonders why I didn’t inmediately jump at the offer to join his department.

TBL:

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free.

You:

you didn’t create the network for the poor, the disabled, and the oppressed

TBL:

Berners-Lee is reflecting on what his invention has become

You:

You succeeded

TBL:

“We can fix the internet … It’s not too late,” he writes, describing his mission as a “battle for the soul of the web”.

You:

Enjoy your elitist network

TBL:

Berners-Lee traces the first corruption of the web to the commercialisation of the domain name system, which he believes would have served web users better had it been managed by a nonprofit in the public interest.

You:

classist fuck

What the fuck are you on about? How do you get from “I wanted it to be free and accessible. I hate that it was seized by corrupt capitalists. I want to take it back and make it for everyone again.” to “You wanted to enrich the corrupt capitalists. You succeeded in that. Enjoy it”?

He’s literally saying “this is shit, let’s change it”. That’s the opposite of enjoying it. That’s trying to get rid of ot.

I also don’t think execution / capital punishment should be regarded with less distaste, but that’s probably a contentious opinion in many places

Look, you’re harming our effort to convince people that there are no bugs in Tux-Sing-Se. How are we gonna get people to switch unless we pretend that all is perfect and flawless? Because clearly, that’s what Windows users expect…

(sarcasm)

Celsius is great for engineering because Things Happen™️ when water starts boiling or freezing. But most people aren’t engineering daily.

I’d argue that it’s more covenient to use a common scale for all applications of the same measurement than to have multiple different scales, just because that would eliminate all conversion concerns. Someone I know is in engineering school has switched entirely to using °C simply because that’s what they deal with at school anyway, to the point they don’t even write °C anymore in casual chats.

For other applications, it seems like the scales we’re used to are more or less arbitrary anyway, so that’s really just a matter of getting used to it. Some are used to calling ~70°F room temperature, others say ~20°C,

So if it matters for one case, but not so much for others, and we were to pick a single scale, I should think it would be ideal to go with the case where it does matter.

Or we just keep doing this thing where people use what they’re used to and we just quickly look it up or someone comments with the conversion and move on with our lives.

Likewise, I prefer to stress that my system worked great out of the box. I just couldn’t resist tinkering with the audio setup, because I can and wanted to. I broke something, fixed it again, all is well.

Wenn man jede Wohnung so bauen möchte, dass sie allen Eventualitäten und Wünschen gerecht wird, führt das zu einer extremen Verteuerung der Preise für Wohnraum.

Und ich denke der Wunsch nach bezahlbarem Wohnraum dürfte so ziemlich der sein, den die allermeisten Menschen gemeinsam haben.

Da hast du absolut Recht. Das ist der Punkt wo mein Ideal (passt für alle) auf die Realität trifft (zu teuer) und nachgeben muss.

Ich neige dazu, das Ideal zu verfechten, da die Realität und allgemeine Trägheit gegenüber Änderungen ohnehin dagegenhalten, und ich lieber versuche was zu verbessern und einsehen wo es nicht geht, als es gar nicht erst zu versuchen. Da finde ich solche Diskussionen wertvoll, um eben diese Konflikte aufzuzeigen und meine Grundhaltung durch kritische Betrachtung zu einer Synthese zu verfeinern.

Aus meiner Sicht ist es also durchaus der richtige Weg, wenn man ein Stück weit davon abrückt, jede Eventualität beim Bauen als Norm vorzuschreiben. Zumindest für die Dinge, die man (ggf. mit Kompromissen) nachrüsten kann.

Zumindest der aktuell sinnvolle, aber das ist letztlich Wortklauberei. Richtig fände ich, wenn bauen schon gar nicht so teuer wäre, aber wir sind zumindest über die politische Realität einig.

Danke für das Gespräch :-)

I’m the type to mess around with pipewire, break stuff, fix it, learn nothing from that and fuck it up again. I’ve got it doing what I want it to, and yet I wanna tinker around and probably mess it up again because I can’t seem to really understand the docs or configuration files.

I’m the type to have two OS (Nobara, Ubuntu) on separate disks, then decide to rip the guts out of the second one (Ubuntu) and just use the disk for data storage (without reformatting) but keep forgetting to also delete the boot partition that no longer works anyway (because none of the system directories exist anymore) but occasionally UEFI randomly decides to boot it first and ends up with a fucked up and hopelessly confused GRUB.

I’m the type to put the second disk in fstab, then unplug it and wonder why boot is having issues loading the filesystem.

This is my primary system, so I’m just barely holding back from messing with the system itself, because I know I’ll fuck up something and I’d rather still have a working system to either troubleshoot from or at least decide I’ll postpone the unfucking and play Satisfactory instead to mess up my factory there.

I’ll probably format my third disk again (currently Bazzite, which I never really fully set up to try at length) and try something new on there. Still haven’t figured out how to make my GRUB add entries for other disk, but also, I really don’t wanna touch my primary boot config.

I can’t stop messing with things I don’t properly understand, get impatient with trying to understand the Docu and just fly blind, with predictable results. I tell myself half the joy is in fixing it, because the second it works, I forget it all and get to figure it out again next time.

I’m the “incorrigible amateur” type.

I assume they mean that the general sense of “Switching to Linux is easy! I’m still fiddling with basic things but any day now…” doesn’t reflect their own experience, nor that of many others who had less trouble with displays under Linux.

In that context “I have an unusual setup” is an important note: It’s not that Linux struggles with basic things, but that it struggles with some uncommon things that nobody ever built and shipped a proper solution for.

Arrogant sneering. Some people really need to rub in that they know something you don’t. Sometimes they teach you. Sometimes they just use the opportunity to roll their eyes that you haven’t read the fucking manual. Never mind if that manual is itself written in illegible arcana unknown and impenetrable to mere mortals, that just serves to reinforce the notion that they’re superior.

The same happens when you do something in a way they don’t approve of and think you’re ignorant of how to do it “right”.

Mind, not everyone is like that, and I’d say most people aren’t. There’s often someone helpful too. But every now and then, you come across these characters, and due to the nature of the internet, it’s somewhat more frequent than, say, a painter mocking your paintjob.

As it stands nlw, if you can’t deal with them, IT may be a frustrating field to get into. We’re working to make it better, but they’re taking their sweet time with turning into fertiliser.

I always put “Hi” and the topic in the first line so they have a chance to estimate what it’s about from the little preview blurb and decide whether to pivot their headspace that way now, later or not at all

It’s unfortunate in some cases, because highly targeted ML is actually fantastic for a lot of data-refinement and discovery use cases, but the fucking LLM + ImageGen + VidGen idiocy has sucked all the oxygen out of the room, and I think this iteration of the technology needs to die for all the truly stupid shit to go away - and it’s mostly truly stupid shit.

As someone who used to be enthusiastic about the possibilities of ML, “AI” and who initially thought the new generation of LLMs a great advancement, this is what poisoned my fascination. Whatever potential it might have developed if it had slowly matured instead of being prematurely thrust into the public eye, burdened with unrealistic expectations and abused to the point that people hate the whole concept and I can’t even disagree anymore…

It has become a fucking parasite that needs to crash and take all the greedy assholes pitching it or buying it with them, so that hopefully its rotting carcass may become fertiliser for something more beautiful and useful than this ruinous wildfire of hybris and inhumanity.

Microslop’s own tools and documentation struggle to produce high-quality translations in places. They translate shit like keywords and function names in their docs.

Example: The German version of the T-SQL documentation for REPLACE literally translates the name of the function in the header: ERSETZEN. At least it’s a verb describing the activity, unlike the page for the UPDATE statement which translates it into a noun (AKTUALISIERUNG) rather than the verb (AKTUALISIEREN). Bonus: the description for the arguments also proceeds to translate some keywords. Go ahead and see if you can spot them, you don’t even need to be particularly familiar with SQL or German.

It’s a prime example of the computer following instructions without understanding the context, but since the instructions are poorly given and the output never checked, it produces uncritically published slop.

Microslop.

Weiß nicht genau, ob du das ernst meinst,

Das war als versuchter Humor überzogen formuliert. Für Menschen mit akutem Migräneanfall (oder zumindest für die, die ich kenne) sind Licht oder Störgeräusche teilweise extrem unangenehm, und wenn Stimmung und Geduld eh schon von den enormen Schmerzen strapaziert sind, verleitet das zu einem gewissen Jähzorn. Dieses Phänomen wollte ich parodieren.

aber nur weil manche Menschen unter Migräne leiden eine Vorschrift für alle Wohnungen zu haben, dass die komplette Wohnung komplett verdunkelt werden kann, finde ich jetzt schon ziemlichen Quatsch

Es wird ja auch nicht jede Wohnung rollstuhlgerecht gebaut.

Ich glaube, da haben wir eine ideologische Differenz: ich fände es richtig und sinnvoll, wenn alle Wohnungen rollstuhlgerecht gebaut würden. Natürlich gibt es aber immer eine Diskrepanz zwischen dem Idealismus und dem pragmatischen Kompromiss mit der Realität.

Eine Vorschrift für alle bräuchte vermutlich eine ganze Latte an Ausnahmen, was dann denn Sinn einer Vorschrift für alle untergraben würde und dem Hausbau letztlich nur noch mehr Bürokratie in den Weg stellen würde wenn jeder erst ermitteln will, ob er das wirklich muss.

Erstens können die Betroffenen dann ja bei der Wohnungswahl auf diese Aspekte besonders achten

Wer den Luxus der Wahl hat, ja, wobei z.B. die (mangelnde) Schalldichte des Hauses auch nicht immer sofort ersichtlich ist, und gerade solche Dinge wie ein Hund, der nachts Terror schiebt, merkt man tagsüber bei Besichtigungen nicht.

Wer den Luxus nicht hat, z.B. aufgrund schmaler Budgets oder weil es nichts passendes in Reichweite gibt, hat dann halt Pech und darf leiden. Das finde ich nicht unbedingt fair.

zweitens kann man das auch ohne Rolläden relativ leicht von innen nachrüsten durch lichtdichte Vorhänge, Rollos etc.

Leider auch nicht immer. Bei unserer letzten Wohnung waren die Fenster z.B. so abgeschrägt konstruiert, dass keine Klemmlösung für Rollos oder Gardinen gehalten hat. Vorhänge war es schwierig, welche in passender Größe für bezahlbare Preise zu finden.

Aber ja, das wäre dann ein Kompromiss zwischen Ideal und Realität: Wo keine Rolläden sind, muss es möglich sein, selbst für Verdunkelung zu sorgen.

Grundsätzlich finde ich aber, Rolläden sind eine gute Idee.

Am Beispiel von Barrierefreiheit: Wir verbauen Rampen an öffentlichen Gebäuden, nicht weil alle oder auch nur viele sie brauchen, sondern obwohl es nur wenige sind, die sie brauchen, damit alle einen Zugang haben. Für diejenigen, die es nicht brauchen, bringt es keinen Nachteil, aber für die, die es brauchen, ist es eben… naja, eine Barriere weniger um an der Gesellschaft teilzuhaben.

Im gleichen Gedanken halte ich die universelle Verfügbarkeit von Abdunklung auch unterm Strich für einen Gewinn: Wer sie nicht braucht und keine Verwendung dafür hat, lässt sie halt oben. Wer sie nicht braucht kann vielleicht trotzdem Nutzen daraus schlagen. Wer sie braucht, dem wird aber was fehlen wenn sie nicht vorhanden sind.