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Stuff posted in this site by me.

And that’s facts

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Extreme closeup of an stage. There's half a human in there, and what looks to be the top end of a bass?

🎶 today was a good day. We think.

We’ve been at musicbarJerb for just over a month. It’s been pretty good other than the physical layer (aka “my body”) suffering under the stresses of long-thought-gone abuse, for we are a mere runner. We run to help the bar, help the servers, help the kitchen.

Our bosses didn’t think the job was so physical, but hey, here we are, the only hourly employee to actually get full time hours. We kinda know the food, we kinda know the drinks, we kinda know when to fuck off and let people make out uninhibited instead of refilling their water glasses.

Maybe, in time, we’ll move up. We don’t expect it. It’s not Minnesota culture to have people like me serve you, or make you drinks.

Yes, this includes you

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Google’s instructions will only work if everything goes smoothly, and as someone with hundreds of hours in ADB from testing various Android versions, I will guess that it will probably not go smoothly.

Source: Google’s Pixel storage issue fix requires developer tools and a terminal | Ars Technica

People forget google hates the fact they exist, which means you’re a sweaty, dirty, bloody meaty thing handling their perfect hardware and their perfect software.

SERIOUSLY PEOPLE WHAT THE FUCK

/ rucksack /

It’s not even End of Day in January 2nd, 2024 in the year of the Lard, and the IT team at helpdeskJerb are already making everyone’s life hell.

WHY

WHY ARE THEY LIKE THIS

Puras pinches perdidas con estas gentes.

I got the expensive thing and paid for it

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Some years ago we purchased one of these, which were recommended by the Wirecutter as the best monitor arms you could get

Fully Jarvis Monitor Arm - fits up to 32" Computer Display (Single, Silver)

All was good and we got plenty of use out of the thing. A few years later the monitor ended up at my workplace but to do so we took the plate off and put the monitor back on its own stand.

During this timeframe we lost the VESA plate that attaches to the back of a monitor, which then locks into the actual mount. This was a pain in the ass cos we like to have stuff on the desk while we find a space for said stuff, and not having the monitor on the actual desk surface makes everything that much easier to clean. Attempting to find a replacement plate directly through Jarvis was impossible as they sold themselves to Herman Miller— so replacement parts aren’t within easy reach, much less at decent prices.

Then a few weeks ago while looking for something else I actually hit on these:

Mount-It! Replacement Monitor VESA Plate, 75,100mm Silver

They are a perfect fit not only for the Fully Jarvis arms, but also for these cheaper Monoprice arms. These arms get you 90% of the functionality the more expensive arms have, but they’re half the price of the Jarvis arms. That’ll teach us to get the expensive thing to show off when you don’t even look at it except to rewire things.

Just putting this out here in case you’re also running into issues sourcing replacement parts, specially if you work in an office.

Of course they knew it was illegal. They just didn’t care.

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Schwalb’s DC lawsuit cites a former “high-ranking manager” at Greystar Management Services, one of the RealPage customers named in the suit, as confirming that landlords used rent management software to collude and raise prices. “He responded that of course they did—it’s the entire reason landlords used the software,” according to the complaint.

Source: 14 big landlords used software to collude on rent prices, DC lawsuit says | Ars Technica

Say, what are the chances there are other cartels in other cities that are also artificially inflating prices through the use of software? We get that landbastards want to make it easy for themselves to maximize profits as we all live in a capitalist society, but this is egregious. There is a difference between profiting and profiteering.

There is a high likelihood there’s a cartel here in Minneapolis given how city government feels safe in fucking life up for everyone within city limits.

We hope they all get fucked.

At least the highway will have no traffic out to the big box store and back

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Filling so much empty ground-floor space may require cities to rethink what brings people downtown. It may force officials to change how they regulate buildings, and property owners to shift how they profit from them.

Source: The Ground-Floor Window Into What’s Ailing Downtowns – The New York Times

“May”? The NYT are just hedging hard on this. Cities will have to rethink how downtowns function, officials will have to change how buildings are regulated, property owners will have to shift how they profit from them, businesses will have to adapt to a different customer base.

Case in point, this article in the Minneapolis St. Paul Journal(disable your javascript to read)

Fhima and other community members who make their living downtown see firsthand how the absence of thousands of Target (NYSE:TGT) workers at the retailer’s Nicollet Mall headquarters impacts the city’s overall vibrancy. From shops and restaurants to public transportation and property values, downtown Minneapolis is struggling without a strong, consistent daytime population there to support it.

At the end of the article they actually have a section titled “What Target can do about”. Newsflash: they en’t doing shit. They just held their third auction to clear own office equipment. Even if they wanted to bring everyone back they don’t even have the furniture to put those people in.

Cities at large could make an effort to populate downtowns with small businesses, small/medium size landbastards, and change zoning to allow for living in skyscrapers. But that takes political capital no one wants to spend.

A lot of people would love to live downtown. Hell, a lot of people already do, but if they want basic necessities they need to get them delivered, or worse, drive out to the suburbs to get them.

Anyway here’s wonderwall

/ local /

In the past three months:

  • Moved to a new apartment. It sucks easily the worst dwelling I’ve had of the past ten years.
  • Changed jobs. I am now at helpdeskJerb
  • Almost got completely fucked over by someone. In their story I’m the villain. I’ll let it be.
  • Got into a fight when someone tried to steal my bike. My nose still hurts three weeks later.
  • Fell in with bluesky. It’s nice, but gods the fucken developers are being fucken idiots.

I’ll try to blog more often.

Smartly helping you break the law

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Straight from the horse’s mouth:

Insert smart chips & building blocks in your Google Doc
Insert smart chips in your Google Doc to include information about:

Other users with Gmail or Workspace email addresses
Other Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides files
Dates or Google Calendar events
Places and map directions

Where there’s a smart chip in your document, you and other users can hover or click on a chip to get more information.

If you are dealing with confidential information you should stop using Google Sheets immediately.

  • There is no way to disable them.
  • Google will insist on forwarding or sharing the resource with people within the organization even if do not need access to it.
  • The changes are not reversible via Undo functionality. You have to revert to a previous version of the file (File -> Version History -> See Version History). Good luck to you if you’ve been working on the file for hours/days and google shits all over your file.
  • What happens when google kills the feature because no one is using it? The original data that was kept in those cells is gone.

This is particularly important if you’re dealing with FERPA or HIPAA data. Switch to excel, which is what you should’ve done from the beginning.

Enduro

/ rucksack /

In the space of a month:

  • Found a new full-time job at helpdeskJerb.
  • Adjusted my schedule at bartendJerb.
  • Moved addresses.
  • Potentially finished my time working at sysadminJerb.

I’m fucken tired.

Tiktok may be the first electronic drug

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Rather than see specificity and device limitations as an inconvenient hurdle to omnipresence, TikTok embeds itself within them—taking advantage of the fact that mobile technology limits how people engage with content and leaning into these constraints (e.g. the user only sees one video at a time and can only proceed linearly to the next video by swiping). This narrow focus enables a “flow state” to open up between the platform and spectator, as attention is entirely channeled to the content at hand.

Source: TikTok’s Greatest Asset Isn’t Its Algorithm—It’s Your Phone | WIRED

We’ve experienced this. Tiktok is extremely good at showing you things that will make your mind reach this “flow state” and then you’re just adrift in the current of swipes from one video to another, punctuated with brief stops to write a comment.

This can last for hours upon hours. We currently make it a point to check tiktok once or twice a day for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time. Catch up with the people we follow, check what drama is going on, what went viral, and then quit out of it.

Disabling notifications helps tremendously with this, as tiktok is a very pushy application when it comes to demanding your attention.

WordPress is **not** a documentation system though

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Writing documentation is different from writing code.

Source: Markdown, Asciidoc, or reStructuredText – a tale of docs-as-code – Dewan’s Blog

I’m currently using commonmark in vim to write my own personal documentation for things and keep running into that small issue of having to embed HTML if I want to do anything “complicated”. I’m also trying out keeping it in git… although this might be a bit of overkill.

All in all a great article on what things you need to consider if you need to implement documentation for an entire organization and you want that documentation versioned and actionable.

Yeah, git sucks, but there are other version control systems out there. Gotta mix and match.

These people aren’t ready for what’s coming

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When some proposed forming their own self-funded water provider, other residents revolted, saying the idea would foist an expensive, freedom-stealing new arm of government on them. The idea collapsed. Other solutions, like allowing a larger water utility to serve the area, could be years off.

Source: Skipped Showers, Paper Plates: An Arizona Suburb’s Water Is Cut Off – The New York Times

Well, those people are free to lose everything cos they decided to willingly entertain the notion they could live without running water. And in their pride everyone else loses.

If the drought in the Southwest continues for a couple more years we will enter water knife territory.

We can be predators. We have to.

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I have some thoughts about the hockey-stick rise of “AI” (more like advanced machine learning) , it’s current iterations are bullshittiers (from On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt

His book On Bullshit addresses his concern and makes a distinction between “bullshitters” and liars. He concludes that bullshitters are more insidious: they are more of a threat against the truth than are liars.

Whatever happens with AI— it’s a bullshitter. It doesn’t, it can’t, care about what is true or false. Whomever uses it also does not care, and they will use it to expand their underdeveloped thoughts and ideas to have it talk about nothing at all, in an effort to confuse and control; to influence you to buy some random widget you don’t need.

Combine the output of AI writing tools with software to paraphrase and re-edit and everyone will have a really hard time telling what was written entirely by humans and what was fabricated from nothingness.

In time, media created with the assistance of AI will probably become the apex predator of your time and attention on the internet, where to attract attention is to attract predators:

Is our universe an empty forest or a dark one? If it’s a dark forest, then only Earth is foolish enough to ping the heavens and announce its presence. The rest of the universe already knows the real reason why the forest stays dark. It’s only a matter of time before the Earth learns as well.

This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.

While it’s markedly safe to hide, it also means you give up your potential for change on the larger Internet, letting those predators bend the environment to their will permanently.

We’d do well to remember that on the Internet nobody cares you’re a dog.

HOWTO: WRITE BETTER DOCUMENTATION

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So, call to action: if you are writing any kind of documentation, before explaining how to fix the problem, teach the user how to diagnose it.

Source: Why Linux Troubleshooting Advice Sucks

I’ve been writing documentation for myself for years, and been using Linux for 20 years and I still struggle with the basics cos most documentation for Linux fucken sucks.

  • Teach the user how to diagnose the issue so they can confirm the solution you have is indeed for their issue.
  • Explain why this is happening.
  • Provide the solution. Could be a bash one-liner they can copy-paste. Could be a script (explain how to run it). Could be a patch (explain how to apply it). Don’t just say “this is an exercise left to the reader.”

And no, “reading the source” doesn’t help. Neither does “read the man pages”; the only man page worth anything is the one for nmap.

If you’re one of those people that say that you can go fuck yourself, hard, in the ass, no lube.

It’s gentrification by any other name

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Not every sector has benefited the same from the influx of digital nomads. Sarai Balderrama, the co-founder of Agencia de Arte, a digital platform that promotes up-and-coming Mexican artists to international clients, told Rest of World, “For over a year, I’ve been trying to tap into that market but they don’t seem interested in staying. You usually buy art when you start calling a place home.”

Source: Digital nomads now come first for Mexico City’s gig workers – Rest of World

The resident population of Mexico City has been screaming at these people to willingly integrate with the fabric of the city instead of just insulating themselves from it. Already thousands have been priced out by these digital nomads.

When Latin American people go to the US or Europe to work, Americans usually scream at them to integrate, and the vast majority of them do, even if they don’t speak the language. They pay taxes, they pay their bills, they spend discretionary income if they have any left after wiring money home.

But Americans and Europeans are not willing to return the favor.

Gonna be a hell of a rager, Thunderbird!

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Over the past couple years I’ve been using Nextcloud as my file syncing solution with plenty of success— you just have to make sure to set it up properly. I’ve enabled a couple of extensions for it (they call them “apps”) but the one I truly rely on is Tasks, which enables a CalDAV compatible to-do list.

Now, over the past decade or so I’ve tried a myriad of to-do applications and a lot of them really fell down on their face:
– Google Tasks: They change their interface so often, at the whims of whomever is in charge of that bit of code over at google. It tries to be too smart for its own good. It’s a google application do you don’t actually know if it’ll stick around.
– Google Keep: Free-form management sure, but it gets extremely unwieldy once you try to have more than what can fit on your screen. It also tries to be smart. There also the potential for extinction.
– todo.txt: This is meant for people who are on their desk computers all day every day. I’m not.
– Remember the Milk. It’s a paid app. At this point I don’t even remember what the limitation was that turned me off it.
– wiki.vim: Again, meant for desk use.
– Notion: It’s just so slow.
– Evernote: They seem to care more about how your to-do list looks rather than crossing items off it. Also you have to pay for all the goodies.
– Microsoft To Do: You need a Microsoft account and they push hard to get you to upgrade to full-on Office.
– Org Mode: Emacs. Just… no.
– I’m not listing any apps on iOS cos Apple devices are toys. Yes iPhones take awesome pictures but that’s cos they’re toys for adults.
– Mozilla Thunderbird: No built-in sync with other Thunderbird instances. Given that Mozilla is putting all of its resources into Firefox…

I’ve probably tried using a myriad others but decided against them for one reason or another, be it compatibility with my operating systems of choice, UI/UX decisions made by the part of the developers, lack of sane defaults forcing me to change al of the configuration settings, etc etc. At some point you just give up. Now, the Tasks app on Nextcloud is plenty capable and so far it has been the only one that I’ve been able to stick with longer than two weeks cos it covers all the features I want, which I found quite surprising:
– Web-based interface for availability pretty much everywhere you have a browser and Internet access.
– Hierarchical tasks! (aka subtasks) with notes attached to everything so you can document what you did and how you did it.
– Compatibility with pretty much everything out there via CalDAV. It’s a bit of a pain depending on what you’re using (looking at you, DAVx and tasks.org.

This last point is what I have to poke fun at Thunderbird. For an application that is trying extremely hard to run your life, they don’t fully support CalDAV, namely, hierarchical tasks. Found this on their Bugzilla

\Thunderbird Bugzilla: Bug 194863: Subtask nesting and event triggers (hierarchical to-do): Opened 20 years ago This bug grew up into quite the young adult[/caption]
This bug has been open since February 25, 2003. I’m typing this in January 3, 2023. In less than two months this bug will be able to drink in the United States.

I like you Thunderbird but what the fuck lol.

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