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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • My shitpost response is that I personally plan to be sluttier.

    My serious response is that social media needs to be more social.
    I hate Facebook because it’s just an advertising platform, but I don’t know what is going on if I avoid it. I wish there was a way to just share social calendars with all my friends. Like - I want a group tracker that one-click adds stuff that I find interesting. I want to only see stuff certain folks have added to their tracker, and have the ability to share with folks what stuff I’m sharing to share, vs what I’m sharing because I’m actually going to attend something. Make it easy to connect with folks, not advertisers.








  • Sleep has always been a challenge for me. Unmedicated I will either not be able to fall asleep until 2-3 in the morning, or will fall asleep around 11-12, and wake up at 4-5 am.

    Throughout the years I’ve tried various modifications to my sleep routine, and am no stranger to medications to help me sleep. (Doctor supervised, while paying attention to all side effects and interactions. Do not try to manage your own sleep without significant research. Case in point: Long term use of diphenhydramine (Benadryl) has been linked to dementia.)

    I’ve found that of the things in my sleep routine, the melatonin is the best tool I have to facilitate falling asleep, and having an outlet for my energy during the day is the best way to ensure staying asleep.

    It’s also useful to note your surroundings. During winter I’m woken up a lot at exactly 4:40 am, because a neighbor uses their remote start, which causes their car to beep 4 times. (It’s very annoying, because they park on the street outside of my place and start their car as they’re walking to it, so it’s not as if the beeping is for a useful purpose.)
    Is something else environmental happening?



  • I reduced max power, but keep my AP’s set to auto manage up to that max level.

    There’s basically a plane of signal that bisects the house where the RSSI of each AP is the same. It intersects with areas where people commonly are on their phones. Depending on humidity, location of people and pets, or even just dumb luck, devices were just bouncing between the AP’s, fishing for whichever had the stronger signal. Dropping the power levels made it so the overlap between the AP’s was less, and adjusting the RSSI at which the AP would hand off clients upward made it so handoffs were less frequent. Small throughput sacrifice in the transition zone, but without the constant bouncing between AP’s (which has no throughput).



  • The first time I ever experienced this was in a printshop with a bunch of older guys who were definitely not computer illiterate, but all gathered around the monitor for the server that ran our RIP/platemaker to watch commands appear in the terminal when I remoted in from my computer to do something or other. (They would go into the room and work directly on the machine, but it was loud in there and smelled funny, so I remoted in.)

    They made jokes about me being a hacker, and although being distinctly boomer-ish, it was high praise coming from some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.
    (I’ve worked with more accomplished people, and more highly educated people, but not with folks who had built a successful business that dealt with a variety of complex tech from the ground up with their own knowledge and effort. It was a bit charming to have them wowed by such a simple thing.)


  • I wish I had approximately double the hours in a given day, and also vastly more coding skill to help in meaningful ways.

    It seems sort of odd that comments or messages reported for spam don’t offer any tools. Even a simple url pattern match that gives mods/admins the ability to click a checkbox to remember the link and take some predefined action in the future would be a rudimentary but effective option.

    I mean, heck, it’s the fediverse. In my fantasy implementation of an anti-spam approach, it would be possible to federate these lists of untrusted links and assign consensus-based confidence scores for links generated from moderator actions across instances. (With options for instance admins to tailor their own trust scores of other instances, so that each instance can choose for themselves who they trust, just in case a couple rogue instance admins try to poison the spam filter.)
    Same concept can be applied to banned accounts, although in that circumstance, I’d suggest they find a way to mask the email address when sharing it. Not that folks won’t just spin up a new email. But, you know. Something is better than nothing.

    Hopefully that makes sense. I’m losing my mind with sleep deprivation.



  • The focus on piracy is a smoke screen. It’s about capacity.

    Build the capacity, and then just start growing that list of reasons things are blocked.

    This is out of scope for this community, but the U.S. is amidst a coup.
    I mean, literally, it’s being raided by a corporate stooge that is breaking all manner of laws to just reshape it in whatever image they see fit.
    In a geopolitical sense, they’re trying to break relationships with close allies, and trying to isolate the country. We see that with the tariff threats, the withdrawal from WHO, the Paris Climate accords, and now with threats to withdraw/pull back from NATO. Domestically, it’s clear that businesses are bowing to Trump or facing government punishment. That much is evidenced by social media companies filtering search results, by media companies tepid criticism of Trump and by the lack of national coverage over anti-trump sentiment. We also see it in terms of the investigations that Trump and his cronies are trying to bring against NPR, of all things.

    This is a play in the move to control information access in the U.S. After the media, and social media, which are now yolked, the open web is the next biggest threat to their coup.
    And now this is the legislation they’re pushing.




  • I did that once and cost someone their job.

    Back in the bad old days of 2009, the company I apprenticed at furloughed the secretary and made me enter in job tickets. We had a special relationship with one client and they used us like one would use a drop shipping company – they sent us their customer orders and we fulfilled them. It was low volume (per job), high frequency work. About 80% of our tickets originated from PDFs that always followed the same pattern. As my first serious foray into programming, I automated the ticket intake for just their tickets so I didn’t have to type them up manually. At the time, I did not realize reducing a 10 minute task to 10 seconds (repeated about 15 times a day) would mean they never brought her back to work full time.

    I don’t feel that bad about it: In the 5 years there she’d never been given a raise, the healthcare plan was atrocious, and she found out she was pregnant during the furlough. However, she decided to look for another job, and found one as a secretary at a school just down the street from her house. It was a dramatic pay increase, much better benefits, and better job security.
    I left a few months later, and a year or so after, the business folded.