khm @khm@mastodon.sdf.org

onboarding is like waterboarding but with bad ideas instead of water

I am not an artistic person. When I am motivated to make something, I take that seriously, because it's a lot of work for me; it doesn't come naturally. If the world moves on and the thing I made takes on new connotations, I need to evaluate that carefully to make sure I'm not letting fear override my real motivations. Otherwise I'm just building more roadblocks for myself.

just once I want someone to send an email to the bug report list like "hey, $thing sucks, here's a patch to delete it because it sucks" instead of performative social-media angrymaking

just once

Just finished chairing a board meeting where we officially recommended to the city the abolition of late fees and the decriminalization of overdue books.

It's nice to get shit done once in a while

John von Neumann was instrumental in both Mutually Assured Destruction as a defense policy and the architecture of modern computers and I'm not sure which one was a worse idea

(Prior to his interference, code and data were separate things handled by different parts of the hardware)

Penguin Computing, a company that does a lot of business in the US federal supercomputing space, has offered to host Parler.

I can't post a link because I am not on LinkedIn, where the offer was made.

"if you don't protect evil speech, then you won't be able to say whatever YOU want either," they told me, completely ignoring that this has always been the case anyway

Well?

my nine-year-old just barged into my office while I was running a meeting to complain that his online math class was insulting him with questions that are too easy

this is the boring dystopia we deserve

I'm interested in stories about how communities are dealing with this. If you're willing, you can email me (khm at sdf org) or share your story here

Conundrum: underhoused people need to be able to fix their bicycles (which are often primary transportation) but COVID restrictions prevent the community shop from letting anyone in.

So far we've been exchanging bikes and doing some work on their behalf but that's not sustainable or scalable.

Some lessons from gaming in my youth have always stuck with me

my nine year old kid just doing road bike things

Sometimes my job seems dull, and then today I'm participating in an interview where the applicant wants to build a dark matter detector.

People who use yubikeys: this product perfectly holds a Yubikey 5C Nano for keychain containment. The Delrin model is nonconductive and won't scratch your shit.

https://countycomm.com/collections/capsules/products/brass-pico-pull-waterproof

2020 retrospective:

- built a bicycle*
- achieved almost nothing technically
- achieved almost nothing artistically
- abandoned most of my hobbies
- all of my staff at work got raises†
- kept my children sane during a global pandemic‡

chalking it up as a win

* - barely ever rode it
† - they earned them
‡ - my wife did this

current working from home status: adapted