Chris Siebenmann @cks@mastodon.social
That cks. Overcommitted sysadmin, photographer, bicyclist, and other multitudes. I write a lot of words for a programmer.
Joined Apr 2017
Having sort of distantly observed the birth of NoSQL from the outside, I have a particular jaundiced view of its origins that traces it back to LiveJournal's extensive wrangling with MySQL (although this is probably not entirely correct, since I was a distant outside observer who was not paying much attention).
Oddly, this view is more flattering to NoSQL than many takes on its origins that I've seen. LJ's problems & solutions in the mid 00s make a good case for NoSQL.
I don't think I have anything I care about in my Google+ account (I never used it for anything), but I'm also not sure I want to bother logging in to Google to make sure of that before the G+ shutdown.
Chris Siebenmann
boosted
Let us henceforth reserve "content generation" to describe the process of making things that some surveillance advertising broker is going to make money from.
If you're putting it on your own blog, it's called "writing".
Today was my first bike commute since February 5th and yeah, I missed it (even though I don't really regret not biking last week, when maybe I could have).
iOS people: Is there such a thing as a text editor app that can automatically scp or rsync your file(s) to a remote server when and as you save them?
(I've realized that this is pretty much what I want in an iPad text editor.)
My Windows 7 VM is so achingly slow, despite running on a beefy machine that is perfectly fast for host things (Ryzen 1800X, plenty of RAM, mirrored RAID). I don't know what's going on, but it's impressive.
Today's Unix account cleanup: I just got rid of my separate $HOME/bin subdirectory for 32-bit Linux binaries. We haven't had any 32-bit Linux machines for something like half a decade now, so I think it can go.
(I still have old 32-bit binaries that I haven't bothered to rebuild, but they can live in $HOME/bin/x64-linux with everything else. Maybe I should rebuild some of them some time.)
Sometimes a little bit of sed can help avoid a chunk of annoying awk. Especially in an on the fly text mangling command line.
Chris Siebenmann
boosted
The Web != the Internet. The web is a strict subset of the Internet. There's a whole bunch of other stuff going on. Email, for instance.
Chris Siebenmann
boosted
@ebassi I'm sorry, but I completely disagree with this conclusion.
As a black person who tries to push privacy, I push federation not for self-hosting, but for community-based hosting. It's a given that not everyone has the time or resources to put into hosting their own services. Federation empowers users to be able to trust their administrators or be them. This is invaluable for marginalized groups.
As a black person, it's a fact there are people who will attack me because of my blackness or because I speak to the issues black people face. On some centralized platforms, there wouldn't be recourse. I would have to hit report, wait for something to get through the moderation queue, and hope the user is banned. In a lot of cases, harassers are left on the platform.
With people like @Are0h@playviscious.social hosting communities for black people, all you have to do is DM your admin or a mod and they can prevent that user from harassing anyone else on the server.
Federation is not a "fuck you, got mine" system. It's a system we can use in order to protect each other.
As a black person who tries to push privacy, I push federation not for self-hosting, but for community-based hosting. It's a given that not everyone has the time or resources to put into hosting their own services. Federation empowers users to be able to trust their administrators or be them. This is invaluable for marginalized groups.
As a black person, it's a fact there are people who will attack me because of my blackness or because I speak to the issues black people face. On some centralized platforms, there wouldn't be recourse. I would have to hit report, wait for something to get through the moderation queue, and hope the user is banned. In a lot of cases, harassers are left on the platform.
With people like @Are0h@playviscious.social hosting communities for black people, all you have to do is DM your admin or a mod and they can prevent that user from harassing anyone else on the server.
Federation is not a "fuck you, got mine" system. It's a system we can use in order to protect each other.
I've had a productive work day so far because I know trivia and have a suspicious mind (and also I'm sometimes stubborn, so I keep digging). Such is the sysadmin life.
Chris Siebenmann
boosted
Well yes, recruiter, I would like to make an impact at Facebook. I’d like to leave an impact crater at Facebook. I’d love to make a smoking hole in the ground where illegally-targeted advertising is, for instance.
I would of course prefer to be biking instead of using public transit, but Toronto's snowy weather hasn't been cooperating. Rather the reverse; just when things look like the roads are finally going to be clear enough for me to trust them, more snow comes along.
(I admit, too, that it's cold and it's easy to keep on taking transit right now. Maybe I could push my biking luck a bit, but I don't feel like I want to.)
The downside (or upside) of monitoring the public visibility of your DNS by querying 8.8.8.8 is that you get to find out when 8.8.8.8 becomes unreachable (apparently from the entire university).
(It's kind of a pity that I'm not sure you can trust traceroute any more, what with all of the wacky routing tricks and router tricks networks do these days.)
Taking public transit instead of biking has become a lot less annoying now that I have a smartphone, so I have something to do on the train.
Life would be better if I could read more comfortably on moving vehicles and if there was service in the tunnels instead of just at stations, but just being able to casually read things during stops is a great help. (And I can push the 'read on moving vehicles' if I'm willing to. It's tolerable now; maybe I've become inured to it.)
Prometheus 2.7's new subquery support is proving to be astonishingly useful. You can do all sorts of things with it that you couldn't before, including hunt for brief spikes in things like network bandwidth usage.
Okay, Mast definitely has some bugs and rough edges on an iPad at the moment, especially with things like switching orientation. People who want a fully polished iOS experience on an iPad should probably hold off for now and live with, say, Tootdon, until Mast improves (I suspect it will).
Also, Mast has just shown me that I’m not a confetti person. And it needs a better reply mode, one that shows the toot that you’re replying to in a more convenient way than the current approach. But ehh, whatever.
I’m not sure Mast will be my favourite iPhone Mastodon client, but so far it may well be the winner on my iPad; it certainly makes better use of space than the other candidate. I should submit a feature request about being able to make the activity side column go away in horizontal mode, ala Tweetbot’s approach.
Maybe I should make it easier by always putting URLs in a 'read later' or 'I am checking these periodically' pile and never ever keeping browser windows around unless I'm actively reading them.
(This will probably require tooling.)
That cks. Overcommitted sysadmin, photographer, bicyclist, and other multitudes. I write a lot of words for a programmer.
Joined Apr 2017
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