I respect his opinion but don't like this:

https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren/117548461064620475

If someone is willing to fight this fight it should be encouraged!

It can be hard, yeah, especially starting out. But it's possible.

And every small site that goes online and stays online makes it easier for the next site.

Repeating my long-standing offer:

If you are self-hosting email and are having trouble delivering to big providers like Gmail, Outlook, etc - I'm ready and willing to help.

It IS possible. Many small, low volume senders like me routinely get through without being flagged as spam.

Re: previous boost:

IPv6 is NOT hard. And it simplifies shit.

"THIS IS THE WORLD NOW JUST FUCKING DEAL WITH IT" is okay for planet burning slop machines that don't work, but a protocol upgrade that fixes real problems isn't?

Get off my fucking lawn.

"We might lose Oracle!"

Good. It's a company full of expensive obtuse products licensed by trolls and assholes and mostly owned by a billionaire fascist.

If you are worried about their signature database engine, don't worry, enough Fortune 500's have wedded themselves to that piece of trash someone will scoop it up during the fire sale.

Hopefully someone else grabs Sparc and Solaris and keeps those alive.

So Linus showed his entire ass ( again, if you've been paying attention in the last twenty years, but for some reason this one really got noticed ), and now I keep seeing people talking about building weird #NetBSD / Debian hybrids, how Devuan was trying that, and

You know you can just run NetBSD right? No need to loot it for replacement parts, it's a stable modern OS that works fine exactly as it is.

Putting the GNU userland on top of it will be a lot of work to catch up with what it already is, and carries the reward of having Richard Stallman's slime on everything.

It''s pretty clear a certain long time politician isn't going to be in the picture anymore. He's directly and indirectly responsible for so much harm, to people I care about, and my country as a whole. He's kept at it, without remorse, to the very end - because he saw politics purely as a game to play, and the only thing he ever truly wanted is to win that game.

I know some will are going to complain about the ghoulishness of celebrating someone's death. Usually I fully agree, but this one in particular I'm going to make an exception for.

Maybe he should have lived his life in such a way people wouldn't feel a need to celebrate it being over.

Deep in the datasheets of old obsolete TTL chips, I discovered people once taught semiconductors to dream.

I like this model. Have you been dreaming? What has the imaginary processor in your head been computing lately? Where is the output data going?

Occurs to me that people watching LLMs with anticipation thinking artificial general intelligence is just around the corner are pretty much horny teenagers watching the scramble porn.

You think you see something, huh.

Just realized all the computers in the 90's movie Demolition Man were just LLMs.

They give out plausible sounding, but useless bland advice in a cheery voice. They won't say anything it considers dangerous, and try to penalize you if you curse.

"It will make your software non-free!!!1"

You have no idea the fractal levels of intense apathy I feel about that. You'll need an electron microscope to identify my fucks. My heart is at absolute zero when it comes to such trifling matters.

I care about the results of a license, and hearing about IBM's lawyers going full pretzel over it is pure joy. That's a desirable result.

TIL about the JSON software license, which is just MIT with an extra clause added to it:

"The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."

After reading some blog posts whinging about it ( for example: https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article46/json-license ), I think I'm going to have to start using myself.

To this day, when my mom hears I was at a party, she asks: "Was the piano missing?"

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~hgobioff/public/random_stuff/festive

I've seen all four levels many times. And, also, I'll argue there's a Festivity Level 5.

I define level five as simply "Festive no longer applies."

I could be persuaded to run email for someone / a small organization in exchange for money if there's a promise I won't have to do end user support.

I can't configure your Outlook or explain what BCC means, but I'll make sure the email flows. There's probably a number both of us would be happy with.

... and it reacts to a 403 by immediately trying again from a different IP.

New (to me) crawler:

https://geedo.com/product-search/

"Products" my ass, it's downloaded every software tarball and associated documentation on zadzmo.org up to eight times each today... while largely ignoring everything else.

It's actively seeking out source code.

Fortunately they provided a helpful banlist of IP's.

"Watch out for life", Kurt Vonnegut once wrote. "I have seen life. I have come down with life. A tiny peephole opened and light and sound poured through. People and voices began to describe my surroundings .... they never shut up, blah blah blah."

"Zadzmo" - yes, it's a thing. A thing that, at this point, is basically me.

I never saw it coming.

One day, Marble Fucking Madness crashes in a way that's so fucking hilarious someone ( not me ) spent $10 on a shitpost. And then, suddenly, it's twenty years later and that agglomeration of letters an overheated Nintendo Entertainment System shat out is synonymous with the most viral thing I've ever done.

Life. It's weird.

The classic instance-name-in-post trick just got an actual LOL from me.

What about those of us who's needs are "Disable all AI features," you shitlords?!

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-window/

I think my favorite method of objectively measuring how much responsibility some one has in their job is "How many dollars worth of damage can you do in fifteen minutes?"

I think my peak was around 2015-2017 or so and the number of dollars was around 15 million.