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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: May 13th, 2025

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  • I would consider it a privilege to live long enough to see the EU invest in and adopt FOSS software as a matter of national security.

    Like all things FOSS & Libre, when a place as large as Europe benefits from the investment, so too do all of us benefit in kind.

    It is the natural order of things; programmers love to program so much that they will do it for free, independent of any profit motive. We only see programmers charging money for their work because you basically need to sell something to survive in our Bootstrappist hellscape. Improving material conditions wouldn’t just make life better for everyone, it would also result in better, newer software, delivered faster.



  • Doesn’t matter. I was a bike messenger for 5 years. We all carried our U-Locks, some carried crowbars, batons, pistols, bear mace, stun guns… None of that matters when someone in a 2 ton death missile can basically light you out from behind faster than you can react.

    The problem is and forever will be drivers.







  • I chose not to have kids not because I didn’t ask to be born, but because I am fully aware that I do not have what it takes to be a good parent. I have major issues with sensory overload, and little kids are basically little perfect generators for unpredictable noise and smells.

    If I had conceived a kid accidentally, of course I’d spend every last ounce of energy I had in me making sure that they had a lovely childhood. But IMO, being able to recognize this simple fact is what separates me from my own parents, and them not being able to recognize that simple fact is what robbed me of having a childhood at all.


  • I want to believe you’re right, but in a world where AI can fully replace human labor, that will likely also apply to the areas of mass surveillance and military suppression.

    Imo, one of the scariest and most frustrating developments in robotics in the past 50 years is the ability to process billions of text and voice conversations, all at once, 24/7. Things really take a different tone when all of a sudden the US Government can find it feasible to listen to all of us, every time.



  • One of my favorite memories of how much Something Awful’s sysadmins were absolutely amateur hour back in the early 2000s was the “lappy” to “laptop” debacle. Apparently Lowtax found the term “lappy” so annoying that he ordered his system administrator to do a find/replace for every instance of “lappy,” replacing them with “laptop.”

    Unfortunately this included usernames and passwords, as well as anything that just managed to have the letters “lappy” in that order anywhere in the word. So, there was one user named ‘Clappy’ who woke up one day to find his name changed to ‘Claptop.’ Apparently this is also how people discovered that they were storing password unsalted in plain text in a fucking MySQL database, which if you’re old enough, you probably already remember that the combination of MySQL and PHPmyAdmin were like Swiss cheese when it comes to site defense. :p