So Fediverse, last week I was laid off by my employer, Elastic, as part of a wider reorg that made my position redundant. 7% of the global workforce was impacted, so I'm not alone in this 😢

I would appreciate boosts as I'm now looking for my next job. Preferably in community open source, but with the crazy market, a mortage and a baby I appreciate any lead.
I'm a backend engineer with strong #cloudinfrastructure , #devops and #observability skills. I spent the last 5 years working with Golang, but have previous experience with Ruby, Python, PHP and JavaScript (that shows how old I am I guess).
I'm searching remotely from Italy.

Thank you!

#FediHire #fedihire_europe #fedihire_it

Keeping an eye on the Swift Boost telescope rescue mission. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/swift/swift-boost-mission/

Tired. A good tired from having thought and interacted a lot today. I walked a little bit, between things.

@glyph Since the newsletter return address is a bounce, replying with praise here.

I really appreciate the "AI is adversarial" essay. It highlights the pre-existing tensions of competition for resources and shifting costs, and the limits of competition to build common good.

It's another reminder to me that peer learning environments and communities, where they can be nurtured and sustained, have been my personal lifeline, and a pointer toward alternatives to the Hobbsean war of all against all.

Today I Learned via @acarsdrama : "Tankering": overfueling at the start airport because fuel is cheaper than at the destination airport. This has a direct cost in wasted fuel and CO2 deposited in the atmosphere. Airlines optimize financial costs, and there are multiple priorities in play when planning fuel load, including weather, wind, air traffic, cruising altitude, and alternate landing sites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankering

Reading about the Iocaine Project, the Deadliest Poison Known to AI Crawlers. Part of its reverse proxy protocol is 421 Misdirected Request to signal "not a bot, serve the real site".

Meow!

https://http.cat/421

I couldn't find a description of the SFD Fremont Station 9 installed/integrated infographic wall art, but I did find the City of Seattle's Arts and Culture e-museum, which is pretty fabulous, actually, and includes a map "powered by ESRI, makers of ArcGIS".

Not clear if the e-museum has an actual home page. "Collections" is the bounce from the domain top, but it doesn't have the feel of a site home page.

Here's art-by-category.
https://seattlearts.emuseum.com/groups/categories/category

I'm a little peeved that the infographic art piece below the "Nine Lives" cat at Station 9 seems difficult to find documented on the WWW.

It's a set of protruding bricks showing the dot codes of the Gamewell style (1850s) clockwork telegraph signals for several neighborhood fire alarm signal boxes.

A capsule history, including some patent rights intrigue (less so than the sewing machine!) https://www.ffam.org/early-american-fire-alarm-systems/ (Fire Fighters Association of Missouri).

Public art at Seattle Fire Department Station 9: https://seattlearts.emuseum.com/objects/2839/nine-lives "Nine Lives", a black cat ever ready to rescue those in its district from fire, a riff on the Eveready Batteries 9-Lives cat.

Under the cat is ANOTHER public artwork, the dot codes punched out by the historic block by block fire alarms, run by clockwork-driven telegraph signals. When the alarm is pulled, the spring unwinds, and the dot code is sent to the fire station.

Honor to the Open Gaming License and System Reference Document; creating a creative commons in roleplaying games and providing more entry points for new creators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Reference_Document with specific credit to Ryan Dancey (a previous acqui-hire at Wizards of the Coast who negotiated the Dungeons and Dragons acquisition) for the OGL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Dancey

I always think of Sir Mix-A-Lot when I see the yearly neighborhood car show, because he's from Seattle and reputedly a gearhead of the automotive sort, as well as a graduate of my highschool during the desegregation busing era.

Playing at my local Diva Espresso during today's Greenwood Car Show. I thought they were an '80s British synth band, but the barista said that they are contemporary US musicians from Boston, Massachusetts with a particular album in the 80s Brit synthpop style. https://www.houseofharm.com/

View Source on mobile is important to me because my web toys are single self-contained documents intended to be inspected.

I am doing portfolio work and if I can add a view as source link, that will let me use that facility without having to resort to other options like linking the same file contents with a plaintext doctype file extension.

But most significantly it lets me reclaim some creative efficacy which the mobile platforms peel away.

Today I learned that View Source is actually available on mobile browsers, just a little bit of tricky UI dance in Chrome for Mobile.

1. Navigate to a site e.g. http://aristobit.com:80/diaspora/clustermania.html

2. Edit the URL carefully, from the start (using the space bar in cursor slider mode). Add "view-source:" to the beginning. You may have to retype the transport protocol if it's not https but http, like "http://yoursite:80".

3. Carefully choose the option offered with a world globe icon. Don't click return or take the default, which creates a web search.

4. The URL might look like this: (broken by adding spaces to avoid link rendering) view-source: http:// aristobit .com/diaspora/clustermania.html

5. When you choose the world globe option, the page source is displayed in place of a rendered page.

I suspect it only works in the address bar and doesn't survive embedding in a post, but let me try a Markdown link. (edit: doesn't work) edit 2: avoid backticks, no Markdown available.

Aha, looks like the VSCA Diaspora chargen video is a diversion from the creator who has a good deal more Traveller RPG videos and authored game content.

VSCA Diaspora is a strongly Traveller inspired roleplaying game powered by the FATE engine: the FATE "SRD" or system reference document, is an open source licensed set of roleplaying game basic rules or "engine", to be dressed up in setting and narrative clothes which are rights-reserved.

Returning to my intention of watching Actual Play videos with the two VSCA Diaspora items on YT. A brief chargen video, and an extended Actual Play.

Chargen: I wonder if I could do a better job in a 10min video, staying on track while adding some examples that convey the flavor of the setting and premise. But I suspect this is a quickie video in a long series.

At least the Lords of X haven't purged my playthrough of Precious Little Animal. I'm not sure where my journal is, so this may be the place that the images live.

Pardon the twitter link. Dishtowel Dusty to pre-empt the opengraph preview fetch. https://x.com/jmeowmeow/status/1363033233739239426

NPR's Hidden Brain discussing negativity bias with Dr. Alison Ledgerwood of UC Davis, and talking about the usefulness of an intentional framing exercise to look for positive things - a cognitive-behavioral gratitude practice.

Dr. Ledgerwood reports a personal practice of celebrating every progress step in academic publishing as an example of recognizing good things..

Alex Roberts' journal game "Precious Little Animal" uses positive framing of daily events in an imaginative setting. (See https://helloalexroberts.itch.io/precious-little-animal ; en anglais ou français)

My namesake signed up for the American Automobile Association in a state three time zones away.

Fortunately the AAA agent sent a confirmation email with her phone number, and I was able to let her know I'd been a AAA member for many years, and my namesake had mistakenly put my address in, in place of his own.

Scenario: Your org has tried "trying shit to see what sticks" and now you're at "ok, maybe we ought to try *design*"

Well then! I have a workshop for that!

It's a great opportunity for product and architecture leadership to collaborate, and to practice system design as **system** **design**

Preview material:

Systems, Architecture, and System Design Overview
(pdf):
https://www.ruthmalan.com/systems/2025SystemDesignOverview.pdf