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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 3rd, 2024

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  • This is particularly interesting, since modern organizational theory tells us that Boeing’s primary customers would be much better off with a shift in power toward Boeing’s workers, away from it’s current leadership.

    Purchasers of huge airplanes cannot afford to purchase airplanes built under leadership that cuts corners the way Boeing’s leadership lately has.

    The striking workers may have an unusual ally here - in Boeing’s customer base, which notably includes the US Government and parts of it’s Armed Forces.







  • Yeah. The litigation risk is considered high right now, and no one wants to be first to try it.

    Which I totally get. This place is largely run by volunteers, after all.

    We saw similar hesitation in the early days of WordPress/Wikipedia/Drupal proliferation. Eventually those solutions greatly enabled sites like BlogSpot and Tumblr to become wild places, and niche sites to pop up for stuff that BlogSpot and Tumblr didn’t want to touch.

    I can think of a few specific anti-spam and security tools that strongly enabled casual admins of WordPress to start sites.

    I think we will see an erotic golden age once Fediverse moderation tools cross some unknown usability threshold.

    Edit: I come across here as really excited about porn. Lol.

    Art has a long history of being erotic, and beauty appreciation is one of the better things technology can do.

    I am also really excited for the rest of the content that will thrive after demand for porn has pushed the technology to maturity.


  • I’m not sure what to do.

    On Mastodon, I used the search function to shotgun random topics that interest me, and then followed all the hashtags on the posts that came up.

    Over time, I started replacing following hashtags with following my favorite users who I discovered through those hashtags.

    Then I started discovering and following their favorite users through their boosts.

    Now that my feed is pretty much where I want it I tend to click “hide boosts” on anyone new that I follow, to prevent their every random amusement from cluttering my feed.

    The end result is fantastic, but it took awhile to get there.





  • Interesting! I learned something here. Thank you.

    Interesting bit from Wikipedia:

    Had Metternich not stood in the way of “progress”, Austria might have reformed, dealt better with its problems of nationality, and the First World War might never have happened.[94] Instead, Metternich chose to fight an overwhelmingly fruitless war against the forces of liberalism and nationalism.[95] Heavy censorship was just one of a range of repressive instruments of state available to him that also included a large spy network.[72] Metternich opposed electoral reform, criticising Britain’s 1832 Reform Bill.[96] In short, he locked himself into an embittered battle against “the prevailing mood of his age”.[97]

    Sounds familiar. He’s certainly not the last person to do so…



  • If your software can save lives, I guarantee the people whos lives you saved didn’t forget you.

    I appreciate that thought. I don’t believe it. But I appreciate it.

    A lot (if not all) of the lives my work saved don’t know anything about the part I played, or even that my software had anything to do with it.

    I’m okay with that. I know that there’s families out there that are more whole today, thanks to my work. That’s more valuable to me than any footnote in a history book.

    Someday those families will be just as dead as if I had done nothing. But I did do something. Millions of extra moments happened with family members who could have died.

    Beautiful things that are eventually forgetten are still beautiful things. To me, that’s enough.

    I’ve been on the other side of this, too.

    I have no way to thank all the people whose medical engineering work extended my grandfather’s life by decades. I don’t know any of their names.

    But, I hope they know I people like me revere their efforts as sacred. (I’ve made some effort on that front, but I know I’ll never thank everyone who deserves my thanks.)



  • I was going to build some kind of long lasting software that improves everyone’s lives.

    I’ve built some genuinely impactful stuff. Some of my work has saved lives.

    But that long term worthwhile project hasn’t materialized. Everything I’ve built is now either tossed out and forgotten, or has long overstayed it’s welcome.

    I take it as a zen lesson about the ephemeral nature of all things. All we are is dust in the wind - including the stuff we make.

    Now I mostly make whatever someone is willing to pay for, and just however well they’re willing to pay for.

    I do make a few handy little things on the side, but I’m no longer burdened with my past delusions of grandeur.

    10/10. Would give up the dream again.


    • The largest e-commerce platform in latin america and the most used in my country requires FR to use it.

    I minimize my use of the largest eCommerce platform in my country. It’s a pain, but it can be done, and I feel good about my money going to organizations that better match my values.

    • The bank is now pressing me to use their app with FR as a 2fa when using homebanking from its website, something that wasn’t necessary up to some weeks ago.

    Sounds like a great opportunity to check into joining a credit union. All banks are predatory. There’s lots of other great reasons to minimize your exposure to banks.

    • The telecoms demands FR from now on if you want a new SIM card in case you lost your phone or it’s been stolen.
    • The government is in the same direction as it’s moving to digitalizing many burocratic procedures and also requires FR.

    I imagine you may be stuck with these. Sometimes we can’t win them all.

    I wouldn’t take that as a reason to give up. Having your face on file in fewer places is very lively to save you future headaches.

    Ideally this will be less of a concern in the future, when the vast majority of organizations no longer have utter shit for Cybersecurity.

    But that day is not today.