joepie91

joepie91 , 14 days ago to random

"Digital sovereignty" is when someone with the correct passport presses the 'deploy' button

joepie91 , 15 days ago to random

I've started keeping a notebook where for every day I write down every 'task' I've done; anything that's a chore, that cost me spoons, or that could in some other way be considered 'productive'. The exact criteria don't matter for this purpose, if it mentally registers as a chore or task then that means that it would've functioned like one to my brain, so it qualifies.

And however weird it sounds, as expected, the lists end up being a lot bigger than I expected them to be.

I very much recommend doing this if you feel like you can't ever get anything done.

#ADHD

joepie91 , 17 days ago to random

Hey, by the way, about that Cloudflare "Matrix server" thing: it's a recurring pattern for Cloudflare employees to show up and start pushing back on any criticism of the company while continuously insisting that they "do not speak for the company" and that they're there on personal title. They've been doing that for over a decade.

Recurring enough that it looks a hell of a lot like a deliberate strategy to exhaust and sabotage critics, which sure would be consistent with what I've heard from people who've actually worked there - intentionally exhausting critics has been an intentional part of their corporate playbook for a very long time. There's a reason they were able to coast by on their shiny reputation for so long.

Plan and interact accordingly. For example, by making it clear that you will consider them to speak for the company no matter what they say, if they show up to defend it from criticism.

(Signed, someone who's been dealing with Cloudflare's war of attrition for a very long time)

#Cloudflare

joepie91 , 20 days ago to random

The LED bulb in our bathroom lamp was failing, so I just replaced it. I wasn't really sure what I would find in there, as it was already there when I moved in, I just knew it was LED.

There was a date written on it. It was installed in November 2009.

joepie91 , 20 days ago to random

An uncomfortable number of my software projects are driven by one very specific phenomenon: I try to help people work with some piece of FOSS software they keep having trouble with, and I increasingly realize that the maintainers have so little interest in improving the reliability of the software, even despite literally offering to do the work for them, that my time is better spent building a replacement for it that does work reliably than to keep throwing time and energy at the same reoccurring problems for a decade without ever having any hope of them getting fixed.

It has escalated to "making a Linux distro" by this point.

joepie91 , 21 days ago to random

New rule: software developers are not allowed to say a user did something wrong, until they've first said out loud what they, as the developer did wrong.

joepie91 , 24 days ago to random

Over time I've realized that I seem to have grown up learning more about household stuff than most, so here's an open offer:

Do you have one or more of those mundane questions about how to do household or cooking things, where everyone seems to expect you to already know the answer, but you don't? Ask me, either in a reply or a DM! No question is too basic, and no question is 'stupid'.

I can't guarantee that I'll have the right answer for you because I can only tell you what I've personally learned over the years, but I"m happy to share those things 🙂

18+ joepie91 , 27 days ago to random

Something I find interesting about a lot of Dutch theme parks, is that they don't try to ban you from bringing your own food and eating it in the park. Instead, they try to make it appealing to buy something instead.

The Efteling goes really hard on this, and has a really high food quality for honestly a pretty reasonable price, and lots of things that just look interesting, all throughout the park and closely integrated with the theme. Toverland has also been trying, but they really just don't have enough food places (yet) to pull it off, you always end up at the same central plaza really.

joepie91 , 29 days ago to random

One of my favourite genres is "people claiming that an activist strategy can't work or is going to be counterproductive, purely based on their own emotional response of disliking it or being offended by it, without having any experience in long-term activism whatsoever"

joepie91 , 1 month ago to random

"How do I build a [thing]?"
"If you have to ask, you're not ready to do so"

There are entirely too many forum/reddit/etc. threads that look like this... how the fuck do you expect someone to learn literally anything if you respond like that

joepie91 , 1 month ago to random

Wanted: a set of three terms that distinguishes "pushes for oppression and exclusion", "pushes for institutions, the status quo, and inaction", and "pushes for positive and inclusive social change". The terms should not imply anything about legality or radicalness of the actions involved.

And notably, terms that aren't right/center/left, and not "two terms instead of three because some of these are basically the same" either.

joepie91 , 1 month ago to random

Look, I'm just going to be blunt about this, because it keeps bothering me and I've run out of energy for explaining it carefully to people.

That rhetoric of "you can't trust or rely on anyone else"? Whether it's in a personal context, or in the shape of "this country can't get its shit together" or "[country]ians don't have the backbone to make change happen" or whatever else?

That. That is the substrate for fascism. That is what allows it to bloom. The divide-and-conquer, the social isolation, the total reliance on institutions because you feel you can't trust your neighbours. The lack of community. That is the very thing that gives fascists their power. You all have nobody to rely on and fascists promise to fill that void.

If you believe that fascism is never going to be addressed in your country because something is wrong with the people living around you, then you aren't "seeing a problem everyone else is refusing to see". No, you are part of that problem, even if you didn't know or intend it. And you need to learn to trust in people.

Trust is the only way out of fascism. The only way to build communities that are resilient to it, communities that are healthy enough that fascism never looks appealing to its members.

You need to learn to trust. You and everyone else.

joepie91 , 1 month ago to random

"Do they speak about others in a derogatory way that's unrelated to any concrete criticisms or harmful behaviours" is turning out to be an excellent heuristic to spot assholes who try to look respectable, beyond the obvious bigotry

joepie91 , 1 month ago to random

Conversation here just now (paraphrased):
"Can we throw a rock at the people setting off fireworks?"
"Well, they tend to throw fireworks in return. Fireworks beat rock. Rock beats cop. And cop supposedly beats fireworks."
"Oh, so it's like rock-paper-scissors, but"

joepie91 , 1 month ago to random

Since it's "family asking for tech support"-mas again, here's your yearly reminder, from someone who specializes in information security: a physical notebook for writing down passwords is a completely reasonable way to keep track of them! The main threat for most people is digital systems getting hacked, and if someone can physically break in and steal the notebook then you probably have bigger problems than the passwords.

So if your family is reusing passwords, and they find password managers too complex to work with, maybe get them a small dedicated notebook to help them out, and talk with them about how to come up with good unique passwords?

(The exception here is when people are in a living situation where they cannot trust those they live with. But in that case, they will likely recognize this risk themselves already. The difficulty people have with tech is reasoning about systems with unfamiliar rules, but physical objects are usually well-understood.)

joepie91 , 1 month ago to random

#AskFedi: I've been noticing that a lot of newer Unreal Engine based Windows games, Tavern Keeper for example, stutter quite badly on Linux (through Bottles) for me. Every few seconds it hangs for a few hundred milliseconds. With a frame latency graph, there's a repeated spike, looking almost like a heartbeat monitor. The hangs are more frequent the more loaded the system is.

It's not a hardware problem - the same games run fine under Windows on the exact same system. Using amdgpu drivers. Anyone recognize the problem and have any idea what might be causing this?

(No generic "problems with WINE" answers please, only ones that are specific to this issue. I've already tried the obvious things, that's why I'm asking here.)

#linux #TechSupport

joepie91 , 1 month ago to random

What an incredible amount of bad takes on the Ars Technica article about Anna's Archive and their Spotify scrape, sheesh.

joepie91 , 1 month ago to random

When talking about banning "AI" contributions to a project, saying "but you can't detect all of it anyway!" is missing the point. The goal isn't to eradicate every single "AI" contribution with perfect accuracy. The goal is to discourage those who would submit such things - even if they managed to fly under the radar, they still would've had to go through a lot of effort to not get caught, and that is already a win for the project!

joepie91 , 1 month ago to random

Core investment strategy: find ways to optimize Firefox and Thunderbird to express Mozilla’s values in the AI era — and sustain revenue. Look for adjacencies in AI. Innovate on monetization.

Guess I'll be looking for a new e-mail client then, huh?

(Source: https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025/11/Mozilla-Summary-Portfolio-Strategy.pdf)

#thunderbird #mozilla

joepie91 , 2 months ago to random

I'm picking back up an idea that I'd played with a while ago, and fuck it, I'm just gonna do it, and see what happens and if it works. So!

Want to learn Node.js (plus other webdev stuff where applicable) from an expert? I'll be doing free tutoring sessions weekly. These will be in a group setting (max. 4 slots for now), but otherwise modeled after the 1-on-1 tutoring that I've done professionally in the past.

You choose a project that you want to make (free choice, not from a list), and I help you with it; and hopefully there'll be mutual help within the group too! You will be mostly doing (guided) self-study, and we will have a weekly session where we review the things you got stuck on, and I help you get back on track.

(I have 20 years of software development experience and 5+ years of teaching experience, and I've worked on a very wide variety of things including niche and unmonetizable things, so obscure and/or radical project ideas are not a problem!)

This approach of self-study may sound daunting, but I have found it to work for 100% of my past students, regardless of existing experience or even learning disabilities. That doesn't mean it's easy; it will still be hard work, as learning something new always is, but I will support that process where I can.

There are a couple of ground rules:

1. Absolutely no "AI" of any kind. Not for writing your code, not for researching topics, not for 'review', not for anything else. I am offering to help you; I am not offering to debate a statistical model built for labour exploitation.
2. You are expected to be motivated and take the sessions seriously, the same way you would for sessions you'd paid for. I have limited spoons, and I do not want to waste them on people who don't really care. That said, I am very familiar with ADHD and other disabilities - I can accommodate these and they're not an issue, as long as you do your best!
3. You cannot be a bigot. As an easy test: if the ideas of 'social justice', 'intersectionality', or 'affirmative action' make you uncomfortable, then this is not for you.
4. Your motivation for these lessons cannot be anything startup-related, in the Silicon Valley sense. I'm not here to help spawn more extractive tech companies. "Learning to find a job" is fine (though keep in mind the IT job market is not great right now).
5. Leave your contempt at the door. If you "hate JS" and are hoping to be convinced otherwise, you probably have some work to do on yourself first. Language bashing (of any language) is not tolerated in the sessions, and if you constantly push back on advice, you'll probably be asked to leave.

What to expect:

1. One 3-hour group session each week. Tentatively scheduled for Wednesdays at 19:00 GMT. It's recommended that you are there for the whole session, but not strictly required.
2. The sessions are text-based, over Matrix. Video/audio calls are not possible due to auditory processing issues on my end.
3. Free choice of project, whether small or ambitious; we'll work out a path regardless of what you come up with. As long as it's ethical, anyway!
4. The sessions have no end date; assuming this works out as planned, they will continue indefinitely and you can attend for as long as you need them.
5. The sessions are free and will remain free. There will not be any upsells, special offers, premium plans, or whatever other hidden bullshit I often see people come up with. I'm not doing this to pay the bills, it's volunteer work!
6. Your level of experience is not important; I have tutored everyone from beginners to people with a 10+ year career in software development. We work on whatever is the thing that you want to learn!
7. This is an experiment for me (in a group setting anyway), so there may be rough edges.

What you'll need at a minimum:

1. A Matrix account and client.
2. A screenshot tool of some sort.
3. Very basic programming experience in any language; basically, you should know what things like 'variable', 'loop', and 'function' are, and how a conditional (like an if statement) works. If you've ever written a script for a game or tool, that qualifies!
4. A code editor that you like working in. Anything with syntax highlighting and a file tree should do.
5. Preferably some kind of Unix-y environment. In practice, that mostly means Linux, macOS, or Windows+WSL.

Send me a DM to apply; for now I'm sticking to 4 slots since doing this in a group setting is new to me, and marginalized (especially non-white) folks will have priority. Likewise, there is priority for people who intend to use their new skills to support (their) community!

The sessions will start shortly after all slots are full, or if I decide that no more applications are likely, whichever comes first.

#javascript #nodejs #lessons #tutoring

joepie91 , 2 months ago to random

Proposal: start expressing all public (city, national, etc.) spending in an abstract currency of "Investment Units" or whatever. One IU is equivalent to some nice round number in the local currency that's about a million EUR/USD/CAD/etc. Spending 30 million dollars on bike lanes? That's 30 IUs. Or have 1.2 billion dollars of budget? That's 1200 IUs. Issued a 200k EUR grant? That's a 0.2 IU grant.

Why? Because people just do not understand the scale of public spending, and you can convince people of literally any spending being 'extreme' or 'excessive' just because it has 'million' after it, regardless of what the amount actually represents in the broader budget. It's fodder for propaganda, and really difficult for people to reason about.

So, scale down the 'currency' used to a magnitude that people can understand. Buying a 30 IU gadget with your 1200 IU salary makes a lot more intuitive sense to people than "30 million out of 1.2 billion dollars public spending". And no, "million USD" does not do the same thing as an abstract currency, because that still has an emotional sense of "a lot" attached to it, but something like IU wouldn't.

joepie91 , 2 months ago to random

Being sick with eg. the flu and meeting people unprotected being normalized + mysterious fatigue problems like ME/CFS that nobody understands the origin of + "huh it looks like something similar to Long Covid may be happening with the flu" = ???

joepie91 , 2 months ago to random

I am so very tired of owo cutesy tech companies, you're a for-profit corp with VC investments and all of the sketchy incentives that come with that, don't pretend that you're my fucking friend

joepie91 , 2 months ago to random

"Codeberg is worthless as a Github alternative because they only allow open-source projects! What if my side project starts making money?"

Never change, "hacker" "news"

joepie91 , 2 months ago to random

Something I don't think is talked about enough is what "getting out of a toxic community" actually looks like. People often have a tendency to identify someone as being associated with a toxic community, and then assume that they must be toxic as well.

But... it's more complicated than that. A lot of people, especially growing up, don't directly choose their communities; they're more likely to be determined by their circumstances. And that means that within even the most toxic communities, you are going to find resistance to that toxicity. People who might still have a lot of internalized problematic views, but who are already pushing back against it within that community, because it was never really a place for them to begin with.

But from the outside, if you look at it superficially, it's just going to look something like "oh that guy uses channer memes, so they must be toxic/bigoted/etc.". And while that's likely to be true in a very literal sense, it often also involves an unspoken assumption that they have chosen to be toxic or bigoted and that is where it goes wrong. Because you can't tell the difference that way between someone who chooses to be there, and someone who is trying to get out but can't just leave behind their social safety net.

So you need to look at it more closely. Do they regularly express discomfort with some of those things? Do they try to reclaim slurs? Do they seem rather unenthusiastic about their participation, as if they're just going through the motions? Because if you see any of those, there's a good chance that they're trying to get out, but they just don't know how.

And in practice, yeah, people from those sorts of communities are going to be toxic. They are going to be bigoted. Most of them probably do choose to remain in those communities, and keep behaving that way.

But you really do need to look out for the ones who don't.

joepie91 , 2 months ago to random

Publicly talking about something that disproves a common belief is frustrating because 99% of the people responding to you have never engaged with the topic before and will just try to defend their belief and feel entitled to doing so because they have never had the conversation before, but from your perspective it's just a never-ending stream of thousands of identical copies of the same conversation where you are expected to explain the absolute basics of the thing over and over again with no end in sight

joepie91 , 2 months ago to random

If your chat protocol has few enough users that "the amount of people evangelizing your protocol" approximates "the amount of people using your protocol" and still does so after several years, that's probably a sign that there's something wrong with your protocol...

(Posting this for no particular reason)

joepie91 , 2 months ago to random

One of the most terrifying things that nobody ever seems to talk about, is how the cultural development and even communication of our whole species is almost entirely defined now by the capabilities of our digital systems in a way that I'm not sure can even be solved, because anything not explicitly supported by them can't 'exist' within their realm, on a very fundamental level.

No 'official' language code for your language? Too bad. Use a writing system that can't be represented within the constraints of eg. Unicode? Sucks to be you. Gesture-based communication? Well, that probably isn't happening. Have different cultural norms from the US? Well I guess you don't anymore, because the tech you're now dependent on is built by US companies to their norms. Sure, you can replace the US and Unicode but it doesn't change the fundamental dynamic.

Historically, cultural and linguistic development has always been permissionless to some degree; you have a whole reality to interact with and affect, anythingwithin the laws of physics so to say. Everything within that is possible as long as it hasn't been made impossible. Invent a whole new form of communication, or have it emerge organically or collaboratively? Why not!

But digital systems are the exact opposite; only those things that were explicitly designed can exist, there's no space of possibility outside of that, and the knowledge required to do the designing is so incredibly complex that I doubt it can ever be a 'universal skill' in society, the way that eg. touch or gesturing is.

And it terrifies me to think of the long-term consequences of this kind of constraint.

joepie91 , 2 months ago to random

In the early days of the COVID pandemic, there was a brief but widespread outburst of solidarity; of people protecting each other, supporting each other through difficult times. In many cases across demographic boundaries. For a brief time, people could experience what widespread solidarity might look like, what it might be able to achieve.

And then suddenly, as if by magic, a disinformation campaign spawned - about masks, vaccines, the severity of the disease, and so on. A disinformation campaign that many (capitalist) governments gleefully participated in, all in name of 'the economy'. A campaign that quickly became explosive and drew lines in the sand, often with violent consequences.

And it seems like by now, almost everyone - including most leftists! - have completely forgotten that this period of solidarity ever existed. It doesn't show up in retrospectives, it doesn't show up in discourse. And everyone now talks about COVID purely in terms of "us versus them". As if there have always been 'teams', always been 'sides'.

I think about this a lot.

#CovidIsNotOver #DivideAndConquer #COVID19

dpk , 2 months ago to random

Fucking. Hell. https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369

joepie91 , 2 months ago to random

It's always miraculous how much FOSS funding is suddenly available when some Dude has a grandiose plan and no ability to execute on it competently, let alone account for the needs of others

joepie91 , 2 months ago to random

Suddenly realized that "getting old" in English has a negative connotation (because it revolves around the idea of aging being bad) but the equivalent "oud worden" in Dutch has a positive connotation (because it means you've lived a long life)

joepie91 , 2 months ago to random

In case you missed it: the Dutch neoliberal party VVD (anti-tax and "we are rational and good for the economy") is on the brink of bankrupcy, they want to solve it by taxing their politicians on their salary to fill the coffers again, and the whole thing is fucking hilarious

joepie91 , 2 months ago to random

"Scoped packages are safer than unscoped packages, because typosquatters can't publish under the scope name"

Okay great, and have you considered that they can just register a typosquatted org name and do the exact same thing?? I swear, I never want to see this 'argument' again

joepie91 , 2 months ago to random

Occasionally I see people complain that "well we can't support open-source projects as a company because our purchasing department has no process for donations/Patreon/whatever" and like

Yeah I believe you, but also donation-based FOSS has been around and deeply integrated into companies for how long? Companies have had well over a decade to implement such processes, and if your company hasn't done so, but miraculously has found a way to use the FOSS stuff, then I am 100% going to consider that a failure of the company to take their responsibility, and you don't get to demand "alternative funding methods" actually.

The social contract for FOSS is that you contribute back to the stuff you use, if you have the means. If your processes don't fit that, that's your problem to solve, not that of the people already doing voluntary work for you.

#FOSS #Funding #sustainability

joepie91 , 3 months ago to random

StreetComplete is a really fun and accessible way to contribute to OpenStreetMap from an Android device - walk around in your local neighbourhood (or anywhere really) and solve 'quests' by answering questions about the things around you!

You don't need to learn anything about mapping conventions, or infrastructure, or about the more complex mapping tools that exist for OpenStreetMap. The app will explain everything to you that you need to know, when you need to know it, and ask easily understandable questions with reference pictures for the answers.

The only setup needed is to make an OSM account and log into it from the app, so that it can upload your answers - and you can also do that at any later time, after trying out the app without an account for a while first. You can just install it and go outside right away!

The app doesn't need any cellular internet connection; it can work offline and synchronize your answers once you reach a place with eg. WiFi. It's also quite performant, and should run well even on lower-end phones. There is also a 'multiplayer' option that lets you split up in teams and each tackle different quests in the area.

https://streetcomplete.app/

#StreetComplete #OpenStreetMap

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joepie91 , 3 months ago to random

Heads-up: #KeepassXC has started using "AI" text extruders for their development process: https://www.reddit.com/r/KeePass/comments/1lnvw6q/comment/n0jg8ae/

"Machine that is very good at generating subtly wrong things that are hard to spot because they look right" is exactly what you don't want in security-critical software like a password manager.