Drop-In Time is a time where I hang out in a room at the library with a big table and a lot of chairs and help people with their technology problems for two and a half hours. These are their stories. It was cold today so I was warming up some water for tea and by the time I got upstairs at three past the hour there were four people waiting for me. Whoops!

Bob and Kathy had a Medicare prescription drug plan that wasn't going to be around next year so they needed help finding a new one.

If you work in the tech industry this whole thread is a spec for the product we should be working on instead of whatever bullshit we’re doing now. We are failing these people and eventually they will turn on us.

https://glammr.us/@jessamyn/117487748124291597

PPWR update from the EU Council:

Simplification: Council agrees negotiating stance to cut red tape for small packaging producers
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/de/press/press-releases/2026/10/21/simplification-council-agrees-negotiating-stance-to-cut-red-tape-for-small-packaging-producers/

tl;dr The Council agrees with the urgent need for simplification and removing the EPR duties, albeit with different conditions than what parliament voted for a day prior (instead of max. company size and annual turnover, the Council proposes to use packaging volume as limit — fair enough and no difference to most micro biz).

The Council's position is: "[...]that producers of packaging and packaging of packaged products established in the EU may be exempted from the obligation to appoint an authorised representative in another member state if they make available on the market of that member state a quantity of packaging below 1 tonne per calendar year. The mandate also contains a safeguard clause in case a producer is found in breach with EPR obligations."

Although great news, I'm not sure about the timeline for next steps towards an actual change of law. The press release only states:

"The presidency will enter negotiations with the European Parliament on this file as soon as possible with a view to reaching a quick agreement."

"[...]the objective of concluding work on all simplification packages by the end of 2027."

I'm very much hoping that the EPR parts will be dealt with on a much shorter time horizon — most of the impacted businesses will likely NOT survive another 14 months (until end of next year)...

Still, one small win at a time! 🙌

#PPWR #EU #Regulation

I don't think I've made this post yet. Partially because I didnt think I was ready. But I'd say it's definitely time.

I'm currently looking to freelance. If any of you lovelies know of anyone who needs a California-based full-stack dev, or if you *yourself* are looking for one, let me know!

You can find my expertise on https://somarasu.neocities.com

#getfedihired

RE: https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/117474817880134546

UPDATE2: There've been new developements:
https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/117486094261932225

🚨 Please read & act if you're running a small online shop in the EU or are even just a customer of one: These people need your urgent support. Otherwise the still new EU-wide packaging & waste regulation (PPWR) as it currently stands and is in full effect WILL kill most of the small businesses in the EU, incl. the livelihoods of artists, designers, illustrators, makers etc. who're trying to survive by selling physical goods online...

The legislation already came online in August, but it's been an utter bureaucratic mess! Official communication and clarification was even worse/absent for many weeks since rollout. An exemption from the most damaging parts for nano/micro-businesses was only voted[1][2] on in parliament today (almost 60(!) days after introduction), but with positive outcome. However, this support by parliament is only a small win and we need more pressure on MEPs to clarify the severity of this situation for the next round(s) of negotiation with the EU Council and member states.

To clarify: The most damaging & costly part of this regulation is the requirement for a legal representative in each EU country you want to ship to. The cost of a single representative is several hundred Euro per yer per country. If you're intending to sell to the entire EU, that's worst case 27 middlemen to pay, i.e. (tens of) thousands of Euro in just regulatory fees every single year. It's completely unrealistic, disproportional, nonsensical and against every aspect of the single market principles... It is now easier to sell to outside the EU than it is to sell inside the EU! Make it make sense!

The only people this regulation benefits are major retailers and the growing compliance industry!

Please boost for visibility! Thank you! 🙏

(Update: added link, punctuation)

[1] https://packaging-journal.de/en/the-european-parliament-wants-to-simplify-the-epr-requirements-only-for-small-companies/
[2] https://www.rapporteur.com/news/meps-back-small-business-exemption-from-costly-waste-reduction-compliance/

#PPWR #EU #SME #SaveMicroEnterprises #Legislation #WriteToYourMEP

RE: https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/117474912086293098

This legislation was a not-insignificant factor in me deciding to pack it in and focus on my health instead, as to make up the lost revenue I'd have had to completely run myself into the ground and I was doing a pretty good job of that already.

It meant what was already a litany of challenges that were difficult to cope with became insurmountable.

In honor of #FOSDEM rejecting our Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity, and Belonging (DEIB) track, and time permitting, I will be posting numbers about diversity in tech and my personal experiences in IT today.

Feel encouraged to share numbers and experiences as well ❤️

Don't forget to unplug your servers before you go to bed

love that either visa, or my bank's payment authorization portal no longer works in Firefox.

yes, this is good and normal.

2027 will be the year of LCARS on the desktop

Some #NetBSD questions that keep coming up.

We don't use modules for HW drivers in the default install. All baked into the kernel. If you're curious about desktop hardware, for x86 there are lists https://wiki.netbsd.org/laptops/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/gpus/ (and the pci/usb manual pages)

x86 virtual machines. https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-virt.html#chap-virt-guest

For disk encryption there's different options, such as creating a small root with the installer, then adding encrypted partitions later (see man cgdconfig). Also: cgdroot.

Hello postor syndrome, I'm dad

#CCC

After the 1917 October Revolution, the Bund’s insistence on maintaining a distinct Jewish culture led to a rift with the Soviet Union. While the political party was eventually banned by the Soviet Union, the Bund found a new home in Poland, reaching 100,000 members at its apex in 1938. For decades, Bundism resonated with the masses of Jewish workers in Eastern Europe, while the Zionist vision to colonize Palestine remained a relatively marginal ideology. But after the Holocaust, which left surviving European Jews displaced and vulnerable, support for a Jewish state rose, while “the Bund, meanwhile, seemed to dwindle into irrelevance,” writes Molly Crabapple, artist and author of the forthcoming book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund.

The Bund Is Back, by Joseph Mogul, March 31, 2026

~

Zionism takes its inspiration from the vicious nationalisms of Eastern Europe. Like all of these nationalisms, it is at war with memory. This has been laid bare in Gaza. The Israeli occupying forces’ murder of the poet Refaat Alareer, the 170 slain journalists, the mosques, churches, bazaars, museums and archives bombed to ash, etc., all of these are an attempt to erase and destroy all possibility of the future comprehending the past. But I saw the same hatred in Lyd, where I had the honor of joining a tour led by Zochrot, a joint Palestinian and Jewish group that commemorates the Nakba. As the erudite speaker described a massacre that the Zionist Palmach militia carried out against Palestinians sheltering in a mosque, a scowling, pink man hovered by the margins. Eventually, he stormed up to the speaker to try to disrupt the talk. The man was bald, with mirror shades and the roll of neck fat I associate with New York City cops, and he spoke with a fury that I recognize well from Eastern Europe, from the wounded amour-propre of nationalists who take their dogs to piss on the mass graves of Jews in Ponar forest outside Vilna, and refuse to admit their grandfathers had anything to do with how the bodies got there. Erase the past, the fascists scream. Memory must die.

When I post about the Bund on social media, Zionists often remind me that many of their members were gassed in Auschwitz. They sometimes wish me the same fate. This makes me think of fascism’s first form of forgetting. Before fascism erases the other, it must purify the self. It must cut off the dissident, cosmopolitan, and solidaristic parts of its own people’s history, to foreclose other futures that might be. This accounts for the Bund’s erasure, and the anger its mere mention provokes.

The rebel dead are not so easy to silence. Not in the forests of Eastern Europe, and not in mutilated Gaza. Their words bleed into the present, where they can be used by the living to create another world.

Molly Crabapple. December 17, 2024

AI means I'll never release another open source software project.

There, I said it.

can you imagine what life in 2026 would be like if the cult sprouting from a Harry Potter fanfic weren't the ones based on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, but instead My Immortal

hey!! if you like WebUSB you should vote for it here https://interop-rank.fxdx.dev/

I think we need a different word for robots that are not thinly veiled metaphors for slaves. You know, all those vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, dish racks, forklifts, and industrial arms. We can keep using the old word for all those remote-controlled humanoid and dog robots, "self-driving" cars and food delivery carts, it fits there.

what's a unix sysadmin's regular breakfast?

cronflakes

@cmconseils