More "boring" service providers who are content with a modest profit margin and slow organic growth, please. I don't even care if the UI looks "dated" and new features take a long time to be built. Traditional boring bare metal, only add new customers when you have capacity to support it, whatever.

A company of 50+ year old tech veterans who have been laid off and left behind from age discrimination just looking to keep the bills paid until retirement.

Run it like a co-op, like a little credit union that isn't looking to expand quickly, just serve their little niche of the community.

Voted early.

Could someone please refresh the data panopticon so that I stop getting ads and text messages.

Appreciated.

#uspol

Regarding Proton:

Companies know that most threats that customers make, are empty threats. It takes work to migrate an email address, and many people are lazy and—when push comes to shove—not willing to spend that effort. So, in the end, many customers will not act upon their threats and companies will ignore their customers' threats.

As Jaime Lannister said in Game of Thrones, "Only a fool makes threats he’s not prepared to carry out."

Bad demand: "Either the CEO goes or I stop being a paying customer."

Better demand: "I just canceled my subscription. When the CEO is gone, I might consider coming back."

Bad demand: "I will cancel my subscription if there is no apology from the CEO." (The customer didn't even state a deadline.)

Better demand: See above.

Immediately put them in a bad position and make them work to get out of their bad position. Don't just threaten with putting them in a bad position while you let them stay in the good position until you act upon your threat. Which you might never do.

Also, when someone shows you who they are, believe them. Don't demand apologies from a CEO who is a notorious disappointment, demand a different CEO.

Especially if you don't even set a deadline, they will assume you're only bluffing. You're making a fool of yourself with empty threats, and they will accordingly play you for a fool. Make better demands if you don't want the CEO to laugh at you.

The Fediverse tonight feels like a collective wake for Patrick Stewart. Thank you, my fellow nerds.

Opening a bag of chips that's perhaps 66% air.

I wonder how much plastic wrapping and fuel for shipping we'd save if food companies were forced to knock that off.

Can we please stop losing legends.

That's right, everyone keep texting me political stuff. Eventually, I'll have every number in the US blocked and will receive nothing.

Another service to migrate away from, sigh.

It's time to get off @protonprivacy https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/

Do these "we've bought your public voting records and are texting you to remind you to vote" messages cost someone money? I assume so.

It is a colossal waste. I wonder if there's a way to have a note in your public record to the effect of "yes, FFS, I'm going to vote. I have always voted, in every election. Don't waste money reminding me."

Perhaps they can send the money from my text message to a food bank instead.

We (Americans) are so used to eating shit sandwiches that, on this town hall at work about how health insurance premiums are going up, we're all "hey, could be worse, dental is staying the same!" [1] or "hey, my spouse is at a non-profit and their premiums are going up 100%!" just to rationalize the trauma.

[1] dental is obviously a small fraction of the monthly cost

Managed to avoid being on Windows for 39 days, given the date quoted by Windows Update. It is taking an absurd amount of time on a powerful desktop PC to run the updates.

In absolutely no time at all, I had my laptop fetch 4.9gb of updates for Fedora while I wait.

Unserious OS.

Need to see if I can go longer than 39 days next time, I only switched to it to check some FUD pertaining to Rufus.

Computers were not a mistake.

The Internet was not a mistake.

The mistake was allowing everything to be about money and power rather than community building.

Nothing puts the lie to "PHP is irrelevant" like "good morning, 70% of the internet needs to be fixed ASAP".

Also, all of the static site generator quips today forget: forums.

I once helped a forum that ran off what was essentially static files, decades ago. It was awful.

We need forums. Remember, those open communities which are not part of big tech, which we're supposed to be advocating for?

While you're patching servers, enjoy the news that EA have shut down BioWare.

(sigh)

Note: Remi is pushing PHP updates for RedHat-derivative Linux distros now... amazing work, but hopefully not too much of a bother while away. Note you can donate to support Remi's repo: https://blog.remirepo.net

(And similarly for Ondrej on Deb/Ubuntu: https://deb.sury.org)

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@Gina/117477912226740310

Guy in tech? Please read this thread.

This was a great day to re-remember that Gnome RDP has a bug where the shift key doesn't work *specifically when entering passwords in a terminal*.

Well today's gonna be an interesting day for sysadmins haha, guess I'll sit back with my popcorn and SHIT I'M A SYSADMIN