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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 27th, 2024

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  • As some of the other posters argued, this is a slippery slope to censorship by those in power, which does not allow for dissenting opinions to propogate.

    Given that free speech doesn’t mean that anybody needs to listen, I feel that the problem (and solution) lies in the conduit for the free speech. I don’t understand the complexities of the laws but have wondered if adjusting the laws to hold entities accountable for their actions would have a positive effect. For example, an idiot shouting from the town square has a limited audience, but if a newspaper picks up the message and promotes it, aren’t they partially responsible for that message?

    It gets tricky with opinion pieces, but we already have an established mechansm with newspapers’ opinion pages. One potential problem is that the current media companies enjoy no accountability, no content creation costs and profits from advertisers.

    On that topic, I’d even go so far as to argue that advertisers share in the accountability of providing funds to organizations that support harmful messages.

    There’s a lot more to this but would be interesting to see a country who has done it and if it had a net positive effect.









  • The cash registers at a place I worked had this for the PS2 keyboard connection, too. IIRC, you needed to slide back a sleeve before giving the cable a tug. All this was behind the tight counter, buried under a layer of dust and whatever else fell behind the register. A skilled coworker could do it with one hand, but I never mastered that skill.



  • Generally, no. On some cases where I’m extending the code or compiling it for some special case that I have, I will read the code. For example, I modified a web project to use LDAP instead of a local user file. In that case, I had to read the code to understand it. In cases where I’m recompiling the code, my pipeline will run some basic vulnerability scans automatically.

    I would not consider either of these a comprehensive audit, but it’s something.

    Additionally, on any of my server deployments, I have firewall rules which would catch “calls to home”. I’ve seen a few apps calling home, getting blocked but no adverse effects. The only one I can remember is Traefik, which I flipped a config value to not do that.


  • This smells a little funny, as others have suggested. I read an article a while ago that suggested that we’re not running out of raw materials; we’re thinking about the problem wrong:

    Chachra proposes that we could – we must – treat material as scarce, and that one way to do this is to recognize that energy is not. We can trade energy for material, opting for more energy intensive manufacturing processes that make materials easier to recover when the good reaches its end of life. We can also opt for energy intensive material recovery processes. If we put our focus on designing objects that decompose gracefully back into the material stream, we can build the energy infrastructure to make energy truly abundant and truly clean.

    This is all outlined in the book How Infrastructure Works from Deb Chachra.





  • I’d take those last 5 bullets. I’ve worked hard to gain salary only to find that it didn’t matter. Every review I’ve ever had was a lie. If I was given a good raise, I was told that it was my hard work. If it was a bad raise, they found one item to give me ‘satisfactory’. A bunch of us shared our salaries over drinks one evening and we all were about the same. That was a big surprise to me.

    Back to the point of the original article, employees talking is bad for employers. Unionization is one way to solve the collective agreement problem, but there are others. When employees (or any group for that matter) organize, they can make things happen.


  • I hear this argument against unionization all the time:

    During those days the only thing a tech union would do would make your life balance better, but at the cost of your salary.

    It feels like fear mongering when there are no data to back it up (this is not a knock against your post, it’s a complaint against the argument against unionization). I only know one person in a union and they have limited anecdotal data that shows that the cost of being in a union is offset by salary gains.


  • Ditto. I started my linux journey with Slackware 1.0 that I got in a book. I quickly got tired of dual booting so I picked up a used 486dx66 on Craigslist. It even came with a green on black 12" CRT! I took a class and started hacking on the kernel to learn the innards. I fixed a semaphore issue, improved the task scheduler for performance and constantly rebuilt the kernel for performance (before modularized drivers were a thing). I learned not to panic from a kernel panic.

    Slackware’s “package manager” was a notepad next to the computer. I switched to debian later and loved the whole idea of a package manager. Mostly because it was a trove of free software, but also because it would handle all the dependencies for me and cleanly uninstall (at a time when disk space was valuable).

    Those were the days! Long live apt & apt-get!