Notices by George Dorn (gdorn@social.coop), page 16

"Leave politics out of tech."

People build tech. People use tech. You cannot have tech without people. So, yes, people will be bringing politics, rights, and representation into tech with them.

The only people I see whining about politics being brought into tech are (checks notes) oh look. White men.

I'm refactoring a web app I maintain, and I'm ripping out all the JavaScript, making sure it has full functionality using HTML alone. For the first phase I'm not even using any CSS.

It's much more rewarding than I thought it would be. It's forcing me to think about what information is necessary for the app to be usable and useful.

Once I've achieved full coverage for all the user stories, then I'll start styling it.

Inside of every giant, growth-hacked company is a tiny, sustainable company that was utterly destroyed in the name of earning capitalists more money.

#AndStatus for android is somehow the only Mastodon client that doesn't lose toots on my timeline or make the timeline jump around every time I load new toots. The ui isn't as good as #Twidere or #Mastalab, but "shows me all my toots and doesn't lose my place" is a non-negotiable feature set.

After some success with #retroshare, I invited a couple friends to try it. We immediately discovered:

- it is amazingly unstable on linux, or at least the version of linux mint it was tested on.
- it isn't compatible with the highest tier of #calyxinstitute hotspots, which are inexplicably #ipv6-only. I'm not sure which is more wtf-worthy - retroshare is #ipv4-only, or an internet uplink that is ipv6-only.

I was going to respond on birbsite this article. However, like many news outlets, 538's solution to getting lost in the noise of the firehose is to post every story of the last week EVERY HOUR, and after scrolling past the same Trump SotU address story literally 12 times to find this one, I gave up. Even if I found it, meaningful discussion in those conditions is just impossible.

Birbsite is not a social network. It is a user-hostile cacophonous shitshow, by design.

Start-up Fire Engineers Attempting To Form A Union:

https://www.bna.com/tech-startup-fires-n73014474793/

Moral: Don't use the company Slack to discuss your unionizing efforts.

However, this isn't over. The second moral might just be: It's not a good idea to fire employees for discussing organizing in CA.

#techunions

In software, employers should see a union as a positive sign that their employees want the company to succeed. Otherwise, employees wouldn't put in the effort to start a union, they'd just hop to the next available job.

When skilled developers are as hard to find as they've been for my entire career, employers should be happy to see developers who care enough to stay and fight.

#techunions

Coworker: I'm tired of being micromanaged.
Me: Let's unionize.
Coworker: I'm tired of working 50 hours a week and being on-call every weekend.
Me: Let's unionize.
Coworker: Our managers are doing some really shady things.
Me: Let's unionize.
Coworker: Why doesn't anybody keep the remote team in the loop?
Me: Let's unionize.
Coworker: Talking to HR isn't fixing anything.
Me: Let's unionize.
Coworker: But I'm scared of getting fired without cause.
Me: Then... Let's unionize.

#techunions

The Netgear WNDR3400 I tried to use to multihome CenturyLink and #CalyxInstitute turned out to be really, really bad for the purpose. It worked, but threw out half of the bandwidth of both connections, probably by being underpowered.

Plan C is to use a spare laptop as ISP clients, multi-wan load balancer and simple router. Any suggestions for a purpose-built #linux distro to make this less painful?

Idea: a Friday #recap of the best mastodon interactions you've had during the week. Summarize and link to the conversation, and add #hashtags you might have forgotten at the time.

#Curation is a very manual process on Mastodon, for better or worse, so let's develop some habits to make #searching easier.

I'm looking for a non-profit or three who need a not-quite-full-time software engineer, preferably remote or in PDX. I'm burning out on working full-time for profit-seeking or capital-seeking startups and want something sustainable long-term doing something good for the world.

Mainly skilled in back-end dev in Django / Python, but flexible and self-educating.

I'm approaching the next stage in my #GoogleDivorce. It is time to migrate/copy all of the email in my gmail archive to my self-hosted mail server.

What's the least-bad tool for this?

#PatreonExodusPledge

I am now offering to double my monthly contribution to any creator that closes their Patreon account entirely.

My contribution alone isn't enough to make this worth it, but if enough people join me, this could make it worthwhile.

Yes, this is vindictive. I want the smoking crater that was Patreon to be a warning to future startups and their investors.