n8   Doesn't follow you    @n8@mastodon.social

ꜱʜᴏᴡ ʟᴇꜱꜱ

Peeves.

So many peeves.

Mountains upon mountains of peeves.

Having a little unexpected trouble updating the firmware on my e-reader.

So, while I figure this out, everybody please tell me the ending to a book.

The term "trigger discipline" seems to have been invented this year by gun nuts for the purpose of derailing conversations about guns by pretending it's some sort of complex, scientific field that requires a certain level of understanding before any discussion can take place. Or is that just me? I never heard it before 2020.

Is there something like StackExchange, but where the first ten replies to every question aren't "why would want to do that" and "Google is your friend"?

Discourse annoy-o-tron: "Hi there! It looks like you're enjoying the discussion but you haven't set up your user account yet!"

Me: "I am not 'enjoying' the forum. I clicked here out of frustration during an hours-long session trying to debug this stupid software and all I want is for it to be over so I can leave this site forever."

Example #2: if posting to Mastodon required you to clickthrough-agree granting its admins full ownership of your words & images, it wouldn't be "free".

Example #1: If OpenStreepMap was running on a purely AGPL stack, but the map tile data had a proprietary license on it that forbade re-distribution, it wouldn't be "free" in a meaningful sense.

I feel like picking a needless fight this afternoon, so here goes:

In a public-facing web service, the licensing on the data in & data out is more important that the license of the code running on the server.

Boom.

[Side note: this is true irrespective of the fact that I might currently be in a different country than the car in question.]

Of all the dumb things I definitely don't need a single-use "app" for, a car insurance card takes the cake.

High-quality free ePub books of classics literature — https://standardebooks.org/
...complete with a real, detailed typographic style guide: https://standardebooks.org/manual/1.0.0/8-typography
😲

These are built from existing, public-domain etexts at Project Gutenberg, but human edited for structure and typographic detail. (And other, more boring, non-typography things like cover art)

Those are hypotheticals that (I hope) are clearly harmful misinformation to propagate. In reality I have concerns about some packages that make unsubstantiated medical claims.

I don't find anything in the policy manual that I think addresses this question....

How would you work to have a package removed if, for example, it claimed that running the program in the background protected the user against radiation, or kept them safe from coronavirus, or reduced CO2 emissions?

Morning task: research whether there is precedent for petitioning Debian to remove a package on the grounds that it is bad science and/or perpetuates misunderstanding of a subject.

Being American during the London coronavirus lockdown is very tricky, since the British people have to stay two meters away from me but I only have to stay six feet away from them.

☑ Celebrating another day of successfully not learning a new programming language.

Ah, F-Droid: where an app that allows you to post *your own* publicly-readable words to multiple social networks gets an "antifeature" flag because *gasp* one of those networks might run proprietary software, but where an app that downloads podcasts indexed through Apple iTunes is just fine.

I have half a mind to find bugs against every web-enabled app in F-Droid on the grounds that someone could visit a "proprietary software" site with it.

Thought For The Day that emerged from a private conversation about other people's podcasts today:

It is *easy* to take yourself 100% seriously, and doing so gives you, in your mind, a homemade get-out-of-jail-free card to dismiss all criticism as beneath you. It is much harder and more challenging to try being humorous, because you to maintain a sense of detachment — and if the audience stops laughing, you're not being humorous.

So I have a whole bunch of `span` elements in an HTML document, and each one has a creation-timestamp. But I can't figure out any way in CSS to style them based on the order of these timestamps.... (I mean in a general-case, size-of-dataset–proof way.) Am I missing some obvious pseudo-class or solution?