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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • Atwood refused to accept the science fiction label for a very long time. Le Guin is much kinder to her friend than Atwood was in person to many folks about this (this is harder to cite because older convention and genre drama doesn’t really show up online, unlike modern). In recent years, Atwood has accepted speculative fiction (the umbrella term for lots of stuff including SF) because it’s convenient for her and helps sales. She was and imo still is a huge genre snob. Don’t get me wrong, Atwood writes great stuff. She just hates a lot of her audience.

    Why do I care? Compare and contrast her to Vonnegut, whose agent wouldn’t let him use the science fiction label but actively attended conventions, telling fans he wanted to be SF but the money folks wouldn’t let him. Octavia Butler is equally fantastic as is Atwood’s dear friend Le Guin. Both love SF and are happy with the label.


  • What are some examples of things you don’t like? That’s really necessary to give examples. Science fiction usually has technology in some form or another. Sometimes it’s the focus of the story (eg The Last Question or Permutation City). Sometimes it’s a tool for the story (eg The Expanse or Neuromancer_). Other times it’s set dressing like magic in fantasy (eg Dune or Book of the New Sun). Outside of hard SF and beyond Golden Age SF you run into more “tech as device or background.”



  • This is why you can’t use The Independent for shit especially during election season.

    “I haven’t seen the joke. Maybe it’s a stupid racist joke, maybe it’s not,” Vance said.

    “I’m not going to comment on the specifics of the joke, but I think that we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America. I’m just I’m so over it.”

    If you send this article to someone who wants to vote for Trump, they are going to correctly excoriate you. I know this because the last time I used The Independent this was was 2016 when Trump first and The Independent couldn’t back up its headlines then. In the last eight years it still can’t. If we take Vance at face value, which we know we can’t but we have to since that’s the quote The Independent chose to use to create their headline, it’s fake news.

    In general, The Independent generates clickbait headlines that pull in a specific group of people that want to agree with the article and won’t verify who then send it to another group of people who will engage with the content to try and verify. This increases their engagement while spreading a mix of blatant lies and loose misinformation. Your life will be better if you filter out The Independent (something I haven’t yet bothered to do on Lemmy but did immediately on a new Reddit account; election season might finally change this) especially if you’re the audience for the headlines.




  • If someone doesn’t understand the difference between swearing at and swearing around, that’s a shitty environment. If I say, “that was a shitty fucking outage” I am using some filler for emphasis so my mouth can catch up to my brain. If I say “you’re a fucking asshole” or “don’t be such a bitch” or “that’s fucking sexy” I am not being professional and I deserve some training on how to not be an ignorant walnut. Even with swearing around, I do think it’s smart to limit yourself to damnation, defecation, and simple fornication rather than gendered swears. There are also some places it’s not wise to swear around, such as client-facing roles because many of the people you will see don’t understand that swearing around is not swearing at.

    I once lost a job after the onsite interview. I wait to swear until I I hear them swear. Apparently my use of “fuck” meant I was going to blow up and be a terrible person to my peers. Two years later I started running a department doing the thing I was interviewing for and my staff tends to be fiercely loyal. I’d argue my swearing speaks for itself and have shaped my professional attitude toward swearing around around this experience.

    I work in tech and I’m quick to police my language if necessary. I’m also concerned about relative comfort (eg I try really hard not to blaspheme around some Christian peers). I do not swear at people. I do not work in a super corporate environment. YMMV.

    I like study (you can find the full article online) and I think there’s been more research down this path in the years since.






  • I think it’s a terrible decision because of this. The whole point of hubs is to get players together and interacting. Putting AH and mail around hubs requires many players together. Giving folks a mount means the hubs stop being hubs and contributes to the continued decay of the multiplayer aspect.

    Take this with a grain of salt. When I last played hubs still mattered. If that isn’t currently the case this is just old fart complaints.





  • Did we read the same article? DNS-01 challenges require updates to DNS. This means you need an API for your DNS. This means you now have to worry about DNS permissions in your application cert workflow. We’ve just massively increased blast radius! Or you could do it manually but that’s already failed.

    All of this is straightforward with infrastructure-as-code. While I don’t struggle with that, I’ve watched devs and sysadmins both stare blankly at this kind of thing for days at a time.


  • While I’m all for opening up codebases after release and seeking contributions from constituents, the landing page has some terrible ideas.

    Similar applications don’t have to be programmed from scratch every time.

    Unless there are very solid guidelines that offer a lot of flexibility to do the opposite and code things from scratch every now and then, you get very pervasive legacy antipatterns. I have struggled to effect positive software change as an SRE at massive enterprises because of this idea. Conway’s Law does a good job describing how this stratifies code. I have also spent more than year trying to get disparate acquisitions on the same tech stack with ballooning requirements as everyone tries to get their interests in. I left that one without any real movement.

    Major projects can share expertise and costs.

    This goes against lean principles that see the best outcomes and exponentially increases the waterfall slog most government projects are. The more stakeholders the more scope creep. Your platform team can be shared; you don’t want your stream-aligned teams to get stuck in this mire. They need to be delivering the minimum viable solution for their project.

    Assuming the software is just released with an open license and the public can contribute, hell yeah. I have contributed to so many projects that I actively use in my day job and there’s plenty of shitty government software I’d love to poke at. The two things I called out require a serious amount of executive buy-in for developer tools and experience which turns into a project itself. In the private world most companies chicken out when they realize they’ve got serious cost centers just making development easier, even if their product is serious software development. I worked for a major US consultancy that talked this big game and dropped everyone the second they were on the bench. In the public sector? Fuck. It’s hard enough to get people to understand attack surfaces much less the improvements a smooth DevX with a great pipeline can provide.


  • If you’re using any work-related anything to post “anonymously” or talk to journalists, don’t. That Blind redirection is chilling yet it’s well within the capabilities of employers. The right way to talk to journalists like 404 is to find their anonymous contact details eg Signal using your own internet connection and your own device. Work computers can be monitored. Traffic on work computers or work VPNs can be monitored. Company email usage can be monitored. Company phone usage can be monitored. You don’t need to be incredibly private with a VPN over tor and anonymous services; you just need to not use company resources. Whether or not this should be legal is a different story; you just gotta know you have fuck all for privacy on company resources.

    I’ve only heard of Blind in passing; that corp email makes it too close to Glassdoor for comfort and it’s very clearly not private with that requirement.



  • AWS makes this impossible in a few places such as a fair number of ACM use-cases.

    I think your cert-per-session idea is interesting. We’d need significant throughput and processing boosts to make that happen, probably at least on the order of 10X computing speeds and 10X transmission speeds across the board minimum. These operations are computationally intense and add data to the wire so, for example, a simple Lemmy server with hundreds of users slows to a crawl and a larger site eg Mastodon goes to dialup speeds or worse. You can test at home by trying to generate an x509 self-signed cert before connecting to a website every time.