RE: https://mastodon.social/@sflorg/117450911499765925

Cats happiness levels based on stress hormones are more likely to predict their owners moods than the owners own hormones levels! 😂

@dan

@irene: Dan has been desperate for flavor ever since coming back from a week in the UK, so he's making water-boiled fish tonight.

our (non-Chinese) friends: ...

the water-boiled fish in question:

#food

Lmao, of course there are Chinese Trump impersonators and they are hilarious. (Xcancel link mirrors X without sending traffic) https://xcancel.com/naiivememe/status/2054910193520271852?s=46&t=V7VfS2X8f7Tb8bB5srchIg

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UIhuYYZj4jE cuteness inside

help I ordered a new cpu but it came some-assembly-required

@dragonminded important beeping
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev34MwRzJPo

local kitty

Okay, you're skeptical of AI, but hear me out, what if we produce an entire generation of students who are *all* the ones who did nothing in the group project?

While cleaning a storage room, our staff found this tape containing #UNIX v4 from Bell Labs, circa 1973

Apparently no other complete copies are known to exist: https://gunkies.org/wiki/UNIX_Fourth_Edition

We have arranged to deliver it to the Computer History Museum

#retrocomputing

Okay, so let me tell you about my doorbell, from a #networking perspective.

When you push the button by the door, it sends a message over the #zigbee wireless mesh network in my house. It probably goes through a few hops, getting relayed along the way by the various Zigbee light switches and "smart outlets" I have.

Once it makes it to my utility closet, it's received by a Zigbee-to-USB dongle, through a USB hub (a simple tree network) plugged into an SFF PC. From there, it gets fed into zigbee2mqtt, which, as the name implies, publishes it to my local #mqtt broker.

The mqtt broker is in the small #kubernetes cluster of #raspberrypi nodes I run in my utility closet. To get in (via a couple of #ethernet switch hops), it goes through #metallb, which is basically a proxy-ARP type service that advertises the IP address for the mqtt endpoint to the rest of my network, then passes the traffic to the appropriate container via a #linux veth device.

I have #HomeAssistant, running in the same Kubernetes cluster, subscribed to these events. Within Kubernetes, the message goes through the CNI plugin that I use, #flannel. If the message has to pass between hosts, Flannel encapsulates it in VXLAN, so that it can be directed to the correct veth on the destination host.

Because I like #NodeRed for automation tasks more than HomeAssistant, your press of the doorbell takes another hop within the Kubernetes cluster (via a REST call) so that NodeRed can decide whether it's within the time of day I want the doorbell to ring, etc. If we're all good, NodeRed publishes an mqtt message (more VXLANs, veths, etc.)

(Oh and it also sends a notification to my phone, which means another trip through the HomeAssistant container, and leaving my home network involves another soup of acronyms including VLANs, PoE, QoS, PPPoE, NAT or IPv6, DoH, and GPON. And maybe it goes over 5G depending on where my phone is.)

Of course something's got to actually make the "ding dong" sound, and that's another Raspberry Pi that sits on top of my grandmother clock. So to get *there* the message hops through a couple Ethernet switches and my home WiFi, where it gets received by a little custom daemon I wrote that plays the sound via an attached #HiFiBerry board. Oh but wait! We're not quite done with networking, because the sound gets played through PulseAudio, which is done through a UNIX domain socket.

SO ANYWAY, that's why my doorbell rarely works and why you've been standing outside in the snow for five minutes.

I see that Hegseth wants to administratively separate service members who have medical waivers for shaving.

It's hard to imagine this as anything other than a targeted means of pushing Black people out of the military.

For those that don't know, the military has "personal grooming standards" that are enforced across the services; this includes a requirement to shave daily, if applicable. This is for a few reasons: to ensure a "uniform, military appearance", but also nominally to ensure a good seal with a gas mask.

However, so-called "no-shave chits" can be issued to service members for a variety of reasons, and these waivers exempt those people from this requirement.

For example, I once saw a guy who had one because a tree branch or something whacked him in the face during an exercise and gave him a gnarly slice that needed stitches. He couldn't reasonably shave _over_ the stitches, so medical gave him a no-shave chit while that was healing.

But the most common reason for issuing no-shave chits is for folks with "Pseudofolliculitis Barbae" (PFB), more commonly known as razor bumps, which are ingrown hair follicles on the face and neck.

Razor bumps are a real thing, and while I understand they are extremely painful, more concerning is that they can become infected, rendering a service member mission incapable.

But here's the thing: razor bumps affect Black folks more than others; up to 60% to 80% of adult Black men who shave regularly will experience them. The percentage among other demographics is much, much lower; like close to an order of magnitude lower. The military's own data, snapshotted in 2023, says that 63.5% of PFB cases since 2000 were among non-Hispanic Black service members (https://health.mil/News/Articles/2023/08/01/Pseudofolliculitis-barbae).

And let me be clear here: this is a real, known, diagnosable medical condition, studied and recognized by dermatologists. It's not like there's some kind of conspiracy to get out of shaving or something dumb like that. And from everyone I've ever known who's had it, they'd really, really, rather they didn't. I understand it sucks.

So separating service members who have medical shaving waivers will disproportionately affect Black service members. There's no way Hegseth et al don't know this.

"But wait a minute! What about the gas mask thing!?" I hear someone ask, "that sounds pretty legit." Ok, here's the deal: the waiver says you don' t have to shave down to the skin; it doesn't say you don't keep things trim and keep facial hare short. No one with a no-shave chit is running around with a full beard that's keeping them from putting on a gas mask.

But even if they were, what about all the SpecOps guys with their "operator beards"? And anyone who's been on a multiday mission outside the wire knows there are times when adherence to the grooming standards takes a backseat to operational necessities; most of us have gone a couple of days without a shave.

And if there were really a serious threat of chemical warfare and you absolutely needed to ensure you could get a seal with a gas mask, you'd shave regardless of the chit or you'd be in MOPP-4 anyway (with no exposed skin). Note that a gas mask really only covers the face and eyes; you'd be putting on a hood and other equipment to cover up the rest including, you guessed it, the area of the face and neck where the seal isn't perfect.

So yeah. I fail to see any way in which this effort is anything other than explicitly racist.

Kiki's favorite place to be petted is on the back of her neck, so this is one of the things she does to ask for pets

#CatsOfMastodon

A little 'borhood hike (critter version)

New phone. Looking forward to all the time I’ll save dialing by storing my contacts… on punch cards!

Added some new Mastodon monitoring infrastructure for discuss.systems.

Sure, every good #MastoAdmin has a cool Grafana dashboard, but we're going a bit more old school here...

'1619 Project' adapted for docuseries. The six-episode series is hosted by project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones and examines how slavery affected contemporary American life. Premiering Jan. 26 on Hulu.

https://thegrio.com/2022/12/16/1619-project-adapted-for-docuseries-to-air-on-hulu/ #goodblacknews #BlackMastodonAllies #blackjoy