Notices by BjarniBjarniBjarni 🙊 🇮🇸 🍏 (herrabre@mastodon.xyz)

@quinn You make excellent points. But even if Gazans were enfranchised, the "responsibility" argument is untenable.

Are the people making it OK with Hamas holding Israeli civilians responsible for the government that oppresses, starves and bombs Palestine? I rather doubt it.

As far as I can tell, in both cases "hold responsible" is a euphemism for murdering civilians.

That knife cuts both ways and should be left in the drawer.

Here's an interesting failure mode for FOSS/community software dev:

Over time, the most stubborn people who are good at ignoring criticism (e.g. by not listening at all), will end up running all the projects.

The folks who actually listen to their users get burned out by all the negativity...

The deciding fitness criteria over time is not skill or competence. It's obstinance. 😱

(I'm not talking about my users. I don't have enough users for this to be an issue yet. 😆)

Pacifists are always despised by people who are at war, or want war, or just feel war is necessary.

No matter which side they're on.

The new #RaspberryPI addresses the final concern I had about the Pi: it includes USB3 support.

The other concern I had was lack of WiFi, which was addressed by the last generation.

The Pi is now, IMO, perfect.

Hooray!

The FOSS world is amazing.

I'm apt updating Ubuntu on my laptop. Hundreds of new packages!

I've only contributed financially (or otherwise) to a handful of projects, but I keep getting all this other stuff for free. It's amazing.

Thank you, community.

Apparently, this was recorded in the parking garage under my office a few years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXraLFFhvb4

There's just so much going on in that video, I had to share it.

Essay questions: Do you think she hurt herself? Was he wearing an appropriate amount of clothes? What happened afterwards?

I worry that every time someone claims they are helping the environment by making some activity "more efficient", they will ultimately be proven wrong.

More efficient means cheaper, which means we just do more of whatever it is.

Plane travel is the classic example, but there are others.

If we want to curb emissions, we need to add friction in the right places - which literally means making things more expensive and less competitive. That's a very hard sell in today's world.

Understanding environmental impact is hard.

Me and my gas-guzzling mini-van have a much lower impact than most "green car" owners... simply because I drive way, way less than average.

Planes aren't bad for the environment because they burn lots of fuel. Planes are bad for the environment because they are convenient and encourage, enable and create a market for massive amounts of travel.

Switching to advanced, super-clean vehicles won't improve things nearly as much as telecommuting would.

Sigh.

I post a negative browser hot-take, and then this immediately pops up in my timeline: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-firefox-to-enable-hyperlink-ping-tracking-by-default/

"Click auditing" is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.

The circular logic used to justify this, is that sites that track their user's click are slower and less usable. URL shorteners (t.co) break the web. Click auditing "fixes" this?

Reality: sites that didn't track clicks, were faster & more responsive. By eliminating that advantage, browsers undermine user privacy.

I just posted a scary post to the #Mailpile blog: https://www.mailpile.is/blog/2019-04-06_Burnout.html

... telling the world I'm burned out and admitting that the project has suffered for it, is maybe not the smartest P.R. move.

But I think people deserve the truth, and it's not all bad news. And besides, the shame and stigma around mental health stuff needs to die, and admitting weakness is part of that.

Tell me I'm right? 😳

@alice @chuck I like the way you're thinking!

Minor counterpoint: computers are free! These days even the poorest have smartphones, which are extremely capable machines.

When we don't want to compromise on privacy, we do have the choice to compromise on other things, such as uptime or speed.

Check out apps like Briar, they're doing some amazing things.

My #PageKite was built to let people run websites on devices without public IPs.

So yes, but... don't rule out the tech side completely.

Once upon a time, FOSS enthusiasts were so concerned about Microsoft, that they recommended everyone use GMail and Google Apps.

Today the same crowd hates Google, so they recommend $SERVICE instead...

As long as $SERVICE is a provider in the cloud, on somebody else's computer, I'm shaking my head.

Many of the things being recommended are even more proprietary and locked-down than Google's stuff is!

Fighting monopolies is good. But don't lie to yourself that this helps software freedom.

I've been low-key annoyed by the copyright rules around architecture in Iceland, since I was ... I dunno, 17? 18?

Basically, when I first heard that architects can veto changes to buildings they've designed, and routinely do so... I just can't even.

It's so ridiculous and bad.

My daily swim is at a pool where the architect made some really shit decisions, some of which are actually dangerous. People have gotten hurt already.

And the architect is vetoing improvements.

(cont'd)

@Tryphon The PGP WOT's core concept goes like this:

1. I publish claims with my key, e.g. "this key belongs to Bjarni."

2. Others sign these claims to vouch for their truthfulness.

3. You calculate a trustworthiness score for a key by finding paths through the social graph of attestations.

It conflates "This key is safe to use" with "a claim was truthful", with "I convinced people of something", with "I am to be trusted to evaluate others' claims."

These are not sane or safe equivalences.

Great. Google have added a level of bureaucracy to their OAuth, requiring apps be verified before people can grant access to their accounts.

Since I missed the initial notice this was happening, and the verification process can take *weeks*, the #mailpile credentials may be disabled. Nobody will be able to download their mail for who knows how long.

Nothing anti-competitive to see here, this is fine. Just use the official Google apps, you'll have fewer problems.

In the name of security... 😞

Rookie mistake: Assuming people asking questions actually want answers or solutions. Often they just want sympathy.

Techie and engineering minded types have a really hard time not making this mistake. 😔

Why is Free Software awesome?

Because it's fundamentally about sharing knowledge and empowering people. It is a culture of generosity.

I think it's important to remember this, because these are values I think everyone in the FOSS community shares, even if we quibble and fight about pretty much everything else.

But - by all means, speak up when you see things going wrong. Critics are, by and large, people who care enough to speak up instead of walking away. ❤️

One of the worst things about techie culture, is it's really deeply ingrained that it's "normal" and "OK" to speak in extremely negative terms about other peoples' work.

We have this culture where being openly hostile and derogatory, is condoned, even encouraged. It's bad.

Sure, software has flaws. They can be very frustrating. We know. And most devs want to fix their bugs - at least until they get so burnt out demoralized that they give up and walk away.

Please don't be part of the problem.

This is worth a periodic re-share:

"Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster"

https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html

Because sometimes the old ways are good ways. 🧓

I should probably re-brand #Mailpile's bayesian "auto-tagging" feature as "artificial intelligence", shouldn't I? 🤔