A blur, again
nullrend posted a photo:
Trying hard to not get stuck in the blur of data) days. To be mindful and present. But it's hard when you're working like we currently are....
Blue, is it
They truly did this to themselves
The practice has since metastasized to so many kinds of products in so many more stores—big-box discounters, beauty retailers, chain pharmacies—that it’s become routine to discover entire aisles transformed into untouchable product galleries armored in plexiglass. The whole thing has a whiff of pawnshop, which might actually be unfair to pawnshops. They, at least, have someone ready and waiting to take things out of lockup.
Source: Why CVS and Target Locking Up Products Is Backfiring – Bloomberg
We gave up on local retailers for 99% of everything we own. If we need to buy something in-person, it’s usually at the nearest co-op, or at Costco. We don’t step into any corporate retailers unless there is a dire need.
Flattened appearances
Gifford v. Sheil is not the first time an influencer has accused another of copying them — copyright itself is frequently weaponized in inter-creator conflicts through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice-and-takedown regime. Gifford’s suit, which takes the battle out of the realm of platform-level DMCA adjudication and into a federal district court, significantly raises the stakes. Perhaps the suit will serve as a serious warning shot to other influencers, but it mostly strikes me as a last-ditch effort by someone who has exhausted her other (few) options.
Source: The influencer lawsuit that could change the industry – The Verge
The article itself says regardless of who pushes a product on you, amazon still gets paid. This suit has the potential to change the entire ecosystem stateside for content creators… while corporations will stay mum so people forget about their role in the entire situation.
Live by the dunk? Die by the dunk
I must not dunk.
Dunks are the time-killer
Dunks are the little stress that bring on social alienation
I will ignore bad takes
I will allow them to pass, or block them
And when they are off my feed I will read things that matter
And where the takes have gone there will be nothing
Only I will remain
Source: Annalee @flowerhorne.com – Bluesky
No, but really. Bluesky is not twitter. Trying to bring about the same social dynamics we had there will only bring everyone down.
Hopefully it’ll be good on tips from here on out.
Here be what’s went on with us this past week. We got our asses kicked.
Work
- bartendJerb is basically gone. Business levels have dropped below what’s sustainable for the place mid-term, but management won’t adjust labor, nor menu, nor open hours. They keep waiting for the weather to get cold. Guess what! It’s cold now! And it’s still slow!
- mgbarJerb: Getting ever busier. We don’t think the corpos expected our location to come out swinging this hard, and yet here we are; getting no support from them while they try to tell us how to do our jobs. There is no institutional knowledge at the corporate level and they don’t provide mechanisms to keep it at the location level. Very little of the two weeks-long training I went through has actually been useful.
Personal
We got mamasha, our storage server, back online. She was offline for nearly three months cos we didn’t have to deal with an entire failed raidz2 pool. But it’s back online and so far, no issues. I have a bit more to say on this since a well-administered ZFS pool is not supposed to fail like this but here we are, restoring from a backup made two years ago, right before I mostly lost sentience.
Today the criminal president-elect announced 25% tariffs on all products coming from Mexico, Canada, and China. Better start a garden so you can have tomatoes, avocados, lettuce and jalapeños (they come from Mexico). If you’re building a house, you need to have your contractors finish ASAP (most lumber is imported from Canada). If you need electronics, you need to buy them now. Service industry will see the price of tequila, mezcal, beer (Modelo, Pacifico, XX Lager) go up.
Myself I’m starting the build-out process for a new storage server. mamasha’s hardware is from 2012 (Xeon E3-1220 V2, SuperMicro X9SCM-F) with the motherboard already getting replaced once. It’d be nice to have something with just as many PCI-E slots so we can put a nice GPU and see what’s what with self-hosted LLM tooling. We don’t condone the use of genAI for artistic purposes but that’s where tech is going so we need to learn how to deal with it even if it’s from an adversarial standpoint.
Bringing this server back online was my win of the week. We’ll take it.
Learning
We need to start learning new stuff. Picked up a copy of Meehan’s Bartender Manual and honestly we think it is helping us understand more about bartending as a profession.
Today we think we’ll go to the library and renew our library card. If it all goes to shit in the US it’d be useful to know another language. German, French or Czech would be nice.
Rebuilt our nextcloud VM since it died when out zpool crashed. It’s been okay to re-learn all of these things, the first time I configured the VM we didn’t keep much in the way of notes.
Speaking of notes… we’re now using obsidian instead of vim+wiki.vim. We don’t spend that much time on our workstation anymore and we need our notes available on the phone without having to fiddle on the command line on the phone. It’s a pain in the ass honestly.
Intersections
Now, on the intersection of work and personal… my phone scrobbles to last.fm whatever songs are being played in my environment. INXS is picking up steam as it is on the playlist at mgbarJerb.
They are also starting to push hard on the Christmas music and that’s going to be messy; had the displeasure of listening to an EDM remix of little drummer boy. Just… no.
This week we get an additional day off because of Thanksgiving. From here until the end of the year it’ll be madness at work.
block the twitter app, improve your life
There are many, many articles out there about the rise of BlueSky. There are so many more about the fall of twitter (yes I’m fucken deadnaming it). But even now, in the twilight of the latter, have had to rarely deal with shitty ads, spam bots, or crypto bros. There’s, I believe, a single reason for it.
We don’t use the official app. At all. We never have.
Currently we use the PWA version of the site via Firefox. This means I get
- uBlock Origin to filter out ads.
- Control Panel for Twitter to hide shit the apartheid muskrat came up with, defaulting my experience to the chronological timeline.
- ClearURLs add-on bypassing tracking methods when linking in and out of the site.
- The app (and thus, the company plus the apartheid muskrat) doesn’t get to siphon any of my phone data.
On desktop we used to use tweetdeck right up until the muskrat took it away. On mobile we used a variety of apps (Talon, Fenix 2, others) before those were also taken away. The official twitter app never held my attention. Using the PWA takes care of the technology side of things so I can concentrate my efforts elsewhere: Spending the time to curate my experience:
- You follow me, but you only retweet and quote-tweet? I’m not following you back. Tweet things you came up by yourself.
- Farming of any sort? You’ll probably catch a block.
- Use of genAI tools to “create content”? Miss me with that.
- You come into my mentions telling me I’m wrong about something? Yeah, you’re getting muted.
This effort took years and years. I grew up on the Old Internet; constantly doing this kind of thing was necessary to keep your sanity more or less intact. It’s why BlueSky is nicer:
One thing that makes 🦋 different is been created by people who have seen it all. Like if you think you’re going to shock them with gore,vore, scat, 4chan, 8chan, 256chan, inflation art, 2-girls-1 cup, lemon party, Tumblr lore, you name it – they saw and became immune to all that when they were 12.
On BlueSky we have the nuclear block. I personally think it is the one innovation that will give it the upper hand over all the other would-be twitter competitors, or even social media at large.
the nuclear block is the single best product decision bluesky has made
yes, it’s sometimes annoying when you want to gawk but that’s part of why it’s good
Building on top of it are moderation lists and blocklists, which build on top of the block function. Like darth says, “just moving on really does work micah tbh“. If you want to gawk at someone posting stupid shit, you can use alternate methods if you really want to, but the vast majority of the time you just… move on, and that way you don’t get enraged or saddened.
Twitter had everything to stay the “town square of the Internet” for this decade, but the greed of it’s C-suite was bound to cause its downfall sooner or later. But even now, at the worst twitter has ever been, you don’t have to suffer the experience the muskrat wants for you.
It’s cheap if your workplace pays for it
Eatertainment venues are more than destinations for date nights and office parties; far more than the rudimentary arcades and bowling alleys of eras past: Resting on three axes of pleasure (food, drink, and play), they offer a seamless, satisfying, and bonafide human “experience.” Sims and Smash Park operations director Kristin Kroeger, for example, emphasized to me that Smash Park’s true appeal lies not just in pickleball but in the brand’s combined activities, full bar, “scratch-made kitchen,” and premise of social interaction, all of which alchemize into a single “legendary experience.”
Source: What’s Fueling the Success of New-Wave Eatertainment? – Eater Twin Cities
In short, they want you to suffer FOMO if you’re not there when your friends are. Minneapolis is having a bit of a boom in these venues, with the unspoken addition that landlords absolutely love them:
- Long lease times.
- Humongous venue sizes. Smash Park in Roseville is 30K square feet. Puttshack in Southdale Center is 25K square feet. Puttery in Minneapolis is 70K square feet
- A lot of them require parking, helping support mandatory parking minimums. Landlords would love to bring them back after they were abolished.
A lot of these venues are also 18+ or 21+. Children are not allowed. Considering the current political environment, in a couple years there will be no children to speak of so it’ll be a moot problem… until these venues can’t hire young employees:
The labor force is expected to increase by 8.9 million, or 5.5 percent, from 2020 to 2030. The labor force of people ages 16 to 24 is projected to shrink by 7.5 percent from 2020 to 2030. Among people age 75 years and older, the labor force is expected to grow by 96.5 percent over the next decade.
Number of people 75 and older in the labor force is expected to grow 96.5 percent by 2030
All in all. they qualify as Big Business. We know US economic policy hates small businesses— although holding small business as the best of capitalism is a mistake.
Eatertainment wants to replicate the experience of you hanging out with your friends at someone’s place, drinking and eating and playing games. But you get to pay for it.
Gotta block ’em all
Robb Knight, a software developer who found that Perplexity was circumventing robots.txt to scrape websites it wasn’t supposed to, told 404 Media there are many cases where it’s hard to tell what a user agent does or who operates it. “What’s happening to people, including me, is copy-pasting lists of agents without verifying every agent is a real one,” he said. Knight added that the Wall Street Journal and many News Corp-owned websites are currently blocking a bot called “Perplexity-ai,” which may or may not even exist (Perplexity’s crawler is called “PerplexityBot.”)
Source: Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones)
The solution we used on this here blargh is simple: We blocked everyone on robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Crawl-delay: 360
We also like to have a terminal window to look at what’s currently hitting the server and we block bots liberally. We’ve already blocked ahrefs.com and perplexitybot for being assholes without rate limits. Does this mean this here blargh will be that much harder to find? Yeah, but we don’t particularly care about it.
So much thinking to be done ugh
So. The fucken orange idiot won the election:
- Department of Education: To be closed, or as close to that as possible.
- Abortion: Likely to be made illegal via FDA prohibition of abortion drugs and Comstock Act.
- Kakistocrats taking over government functions. See who is getting picked to the orange idiot’s cabinet.
- Immigration: Paths are going to get completely blocked off. And they’re talking about getting rid of Jus soli and switching to Jus sanguinis. Also, deporting millions of people. Doesn’t matter if you’re citizen, resident, or illegal. If you’re not white, you’re going.
- Economy: Accelerationists are going to take over and they fully plan to crash the economy to achieve their societal aims.
- Whatever it is they decide to fuck up next. Go read about Project 2025 to find out. You’re not going to like it.
For the past week we’ve been considering our options and we don’t have a lot of leeway— our savings were considerably sapped by large purchases for family and my own period of unemployment from August to October. We have just enough to get out with a large bag and that is dependent on us being able to afford to get out.
I don’t want to start over yet again, for the nth time in our lives. We have much to consider in the next month. Then comes the execution of whatever plans we come up with.
While we grapple with my personal facts, a whole lot of magaots are now realizing how badly they’re about to get fucked by the person they voted for. They’ll cry and they’ll moan and they’ll want for rescue but… what’s done is done. Fuck their feelings.
That was the big thing. Now for the usual things:
- bartendJerb: Slowly picking up now that the weather has turned colder. It’s not nearly as cold as it should be. No idea how well the cocktails I came up with are selling, no one tells me numbers of any sort. I don’t think anyone knows numbers of any sort anyways.
- mgbarJerb: It’s picking up steam and a lot of our staff still haven’t gotten it through their heads we are a high-volume craft cocktail and they need to fucken move. We don’t have the staffing levels they have at Bar La Grassa, much less that level of service.
- Reading: Re-reading Meehan’s Bartender Manual to understand better what the fuck it is they want us to do at mgbarJerb.
I’ve mostly cut out twitter out of my social posting as most of those circles have moved over to bluesky, with twitter itself cratering even further down that it was before; still keep a browser window open to the site but it’s mostly for reading, not for posting. Been pruning a lot of my RSS feeds to cut out a lot of stuff we don’t follow anymore. Also! we rejiggered MariaDB on this server and hopefully OOM-killer will leave it alone from now on.
We also wanted to build a new server to replace our aging storage server hardware but… it depends on what we decide to do given the economy situation around this here parts.
The last bit we need to do is figure out a way to get us to sleep at a decent hour. We’ve been going to sleep with the first light of the sun and… we’ve missed out on overtime at work due to us not being awake to actually take the shifts. This post is one of those actions we’re taking since it’s keeping us awake past the usual sleep window.
We are fucked
We briefly lived in an era in which the photograph was a shortcut to reality, to knowing things, to having a smoking gun. It was an extraordinarily useful tool for navigating the world around us. We are now leaping headfirst into a future in which reality is simply less knowable. The lost Library of Alexandria could have fit onto the microSD card in my Nintendo Switch, and yet the cutting edge of technology is a handheld telephone that spews lies as a fun little bonus feature.
Source: No one’s ready for this – The Verge
Years ago I remember reading a story about a technology that lets you remember everything as it truly happened, no as you remember it happening. The main character realized most of his adult life he had been the one to fuck up. Another one I remember is The Light of Other Days, by Stephen Baxter based on a synopsys by Arthur C. Clarke.
Until we develop a technology like it, any visual media cannot be granted any authoritative display of fact. In a few months (hopefully years) the same will happen to video.
Computer illiteracy is just another symptom of mass disability
The unhappy truth is the complexity of our technological environment has exceeded the cognitive grasp of most humans. We now have an unsustainable mismatch between “middle-class” work and the cognitive talents of a large percentage of Americans.
This is something we experienced at helpdeskJerb (a school). Most of the upper management had worked there for decades and had seen the technological environment go from zero tech to full-on academic infrastructure.
… And the vast majority of them could not handle it. About the most they can do is interact via email. Instant messaging? CRM? ERP? Completely out of their abilities. Which meant they need assistants to translate and handle things coming from the system/environment into something they could manage via email… bypassing the system entirely. It’s fine for them, but then someone has to enter the information into the system. During my time there we found this usually doesn’t happen, so there’s a lot of institutional memory that is lost when people leave the school.
That’s the management. Noticed the same thing happening with new students: A fair number of them were completely unable to navigate the school’s intranet and course management systems, requiring extra attention from counselors and assistants to get them signed up for what they wanted to study.
For all that modernity provides, it doesn’t help when you’re disabled. And now with the incoming US administration, they would rather you just die.
it’s okay to just be a manager. It’s fine and we mean it
But leadership, oh baby, that’s what everyone wants to do. Managing is mundane and leadership is exciting. A manager handles trivialities, like hiring and firing. A leader has the privilege of serving as a shining moral beacon, soothing the trouble, reading the psychodynamic eddies (read: vibes) in the organization. At its best, it is a genuinely noble endeavor, not carried out by whoever happens to be at the top of an organizational chart, but whoever has the capacity to encourage other people to be their best selves at a given moment. The most inspiring person in my life yesterday was not anyone that gives talks about how amazing their own skills are, but the seven year old in the house next door who was drilling table tennis so determinedly that I guiltily got some piano practice in.
Source: Leadership Is A Hell Of A Drug — Ludicity
We’ve worked for chefs and GMs who will say they’re not leaders. They’re just making sure the things that need doing are done and that they’re done properly and in a timely manner. And we’ve worked for leaders who will abuse and belittle everyone in the payroll because they’re inferior and unfit to even be considered for full-time work anymore; then they’re surprised when people leave or ragequit.
Looking at you, bistroBoss, you sack of shite.
Lake and 25th
nullrend posted a photo:
For the longest time this intersection was a speedway. I like it better now. I'd like it better with a white bike to remind people speeding.
The long slow painful backroad to renewed sentience
It’s been a busy week over here:
- bartendJerb: I was non-ceremoniously put in charge of the winter drinks menu. The previous-previous bar manager neglected to leave his builds behind so… we got to come up with new ones. We think there are two good cocktails, two decent cocktails, and one iffy cocktail. But they’re done and mostly ready for launch barring ingredient availability. Yellow chartreuse is not cheap.
- mgbarJerb: It is having new-restaurant issues that we personally thought would not happen at all given it is a corporate rim enterprise with many other venues all over the United States. And yet we keep having logistics issues all over the damn place. Also, la barra fue diseñada con las nalgas (designed with the ass cheeks. Pencil held between them). But hopefully we’ll be able to implement changes that will make life easier for our barbacks and our servers.
- bistroJerb: Gossip says they’re looking for another bar manager. It will be their fifth of this year— just this year. That’s in addition to the slow season coming up for them. The temperature dropped a solid 35 °F from yesterday. The joint is supposed to be featured on a tv show one of these days and bistroBoss is hanging all of his hopes on the business picking up for the business because of it.
All in all it has been busy and we are making money after taking a li’l menty break hiatus over the summer. Our big expense has been going out to eat and drink but we are currently in the process of reconstructing our kitchen space so we can actually cook at volume. The lack of counter space once again comes in to haunt us in our tiny little galley kitchen but… it is much better than the lame tiny space we used to live before.
Slowly we regain the ability to concentrate and think. We lost that for a long, long time. We fucked up a lot of things during that time.
Going to try and do these reports to myself more often. They help to keep track of dates and events.
