i don't get to see enough lizards

we're going to a party a bit too far away to want to drive back that night even if anybody wanted to stay sober to do the driving, and i'm trying to find a couple of hotel rooms, and the main thing i'm learning from this is that hotel websites absolutely do not fucking work at all

oh my god.

anyway i think i crossed the "the majority of code i review will be slop from here on out" threshold today.

i work with conscientious people, so "slop" is an imprecise description. a good portion of this stuff will have been evaluated by people equipped to understand it. but there's no longer any real way to know what's been written directly by a human, and it's clearly less and less as time passes.

it's windy. the wheels are floating on black ice.

you know that feeling when you're driving or biking in heavy rain, or in icy conditions, or in strong wind, and you can tell the wheels are no longer in contact with the ground in a way that completes the usual tight feedback loop between how you operate the controls and how the motion of the vehicle responds? that sense you have of floating or drifting, and your model of the system you were controlling your place in until a moment ago is at least temporarily void?

i feel like this movie has better tailoring than the #monsterdon average

chekhov's acid pit

#monsterdon

worked.

it sounds like if you don't want the sync feature anyway, you can go to about:config, and toggle:

identity.fxaccounts.enabled

to false. then restart.

i'm about to restart and see if it works...

(i myself have been as guilty as anyone of declaring a thing easy without the requisite experience. i have far too often been wrong about this, even for things that fall pretty well within my usual scope of work. you can take it too far the other direction, lord knows, but i'm earnestly trying to do this less. it _might_ be easy, sure, but until you have actually opened the box and made eye contact with the *particular* gremlins contained therein...)

when a person says that a thing is easy, it is useful to know whether they understand what the thing is and have actually themselves done it under similar conditions.

everybody's posting like "RIP debian" type stuff, but i don't know who we're kidding here with any reading that isn't pretty much just "RIP software as a whole". like exactly what un-sloppified upstreams do we imagine are going to be left for debian to package?

i would like to have words with whichever clever person decided that a little velcro tail at right angles to the strap would be a clever addition to the end of ratchet straps

male loneliness epidemic? ok, sure, whatever, but suppose that what i would really like is to just be alone on the eastern rural great plains with the buzzing insects and the wind blowing across the prairie grasses and the occasional sound of farm equipment in the distance. not for long, just like a couple or three decades before i am lowered into an unremarkable grave in a small cemetery up on a low hill.

i'm more of a community disorganizer, myself

it's raining gently outside the screen door, an occasional little roll of thunder

it's a weird contrast between how nerd tendencies have panned out for collective action (write an operating system, write an encyclopedia) vs. collective action (do literally anything that will meaningfully obstruct or limit the concentration of capital & power).

you know how some longstanding problems are by now, in a ship-of-theseus way, composed almost entirely of previous attempts to solve the problem?

yeah, that's what i do for a living. it's going great.

lovecraft style weird fiction: unspeakable non-euclidean horrors! mind-warping geometries! seriously these things will compromise your sanity, do not correlate the contents of your mind!

reality: look, you're probably just better off if you can avoid reconciling or displaying any tabular data

the beauty of a spreadsheet is that it's a database given visual representation & spatial form

the horror of a spreadsheet is that it's a database constrained by visual representation & spatial form