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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • You will never be able to block them from viewing stuff they want to see. They’ll either do it through their friends devices, on other WiFi connections, or at school where networks are hilariously open or easy to bypass.

    The best thing, and frankly the only thing you can do as a parent is to be engaged with them. Make them think critically on subjects, and if something they parrot back is nonsense, call them out on it. Cast that seed of doubt in their mind. If they choose to continue to watch stupid shit, that’s their choice, and it’s only worth stepping in if it’s actively dangerous.








  • Several reasons:

    • Mastodon is REALLY unfriendly from a UX perspective. To many, federation is a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist for them. In their mind, the early model of federation is like email, a problem that was “solved” years ago by having one corporate product that was much better than others (Gmail).
    • Reiterating, why should people care about the fediverse?
    • The fediverse is lacking the user numbers, and those that do post don’t really interact with others. Spend some time with the newhere tag and you’ll see a lot of people that make the occasional post, send a lot of replies, and end up leaving because that engagement ends up with maybe 2 followers. It’s rather clique-y.
    • Some fediverse sites (e.g. Lemmy) have bad reputations, and Mastodon partly suffers from this. Outside of tech, where people argue with each other all the time anyway, there isn’t really anything worthwhile being posted.

    Generally speaking, how is Mastodon any better than Bluesky? How is Lemmy any better than Reddit? If you can’t answer that in a way the average person gives a fuck about, what’s the argument for using them?


  • I had a chat with someone that is a Senior Staff Engineer at a huge company a while ago, on what I’d say is a pretty big service that millions use.

    They don’t write much code any more, but they debug a lot of issues. The way they described the workflow to mastery is:

    • If you know nothing, ask someone that knows something
    • If you know something, Google, and there will be answer from an expert
    • If you’re an expert and Google doesn’t work, read the docs and specs from the masters
    • If you’re a master, start writing the specs, and offer addendums for when the spec needs to change.

    IMO, Googling gets you 99% of the way there in many situations, but if you know nothing the answer might be in front of you and you wouldn’t know it.








  • Google gained their initial position fair and square. They had the better search engine, and despite the likes of Bing being actually pretty good they were never able to compete.

    All Google had to do was to follow its initial mantra of “don’t be evil”. That’s literally all it needed to do. Sadly, they were evil, and these are the seeds of that evil. I maintain today that Chrome, YouTube, Maps, and Search would still be dominant if Google were to welcome third-parties to compete and take space on their devices.

    This, IMO, is a case that is damaging to their CEO above anything else. It shows that over the last few years many of the steps taken that have alienated fans and employees have actually damaged the company too. The exec actions have damaged them, and as such the execs should pay the price or course-correct.


  • Yes, although for a good reason.

    I ate at a fairly well-known cafe where I live, and had a sandwich and side salad. I finished the salad, and near the end I felt a weird crunch in my mouth. Suddenly I could taste blood near my gums, and when I looked at what was left of the salad I could see broken glass.

    Obviously, I was a little panicked, and my wife quickly called someone over to say that there was glass in my food. One person stayed with me while the manager went to the back, and found out that one of the chefs had broken a glass on the table, but had just washed the salad clean rather than throwing it. By this point I was really embarrassed because around 30 people were staring to see what was happening, given that I had blood coming out of my mouth

    I said that this was probably in other people’s food, so they should probably tell others, but instead of responding they handed me cash to cover our meal, apologised, and walked away. I shouted at them to say that they shouldn’t ignore it because others were eating the same salad. My wife chimed in and told everyone that we had found glass in the salad and that they shouldn’t eat it.

    I’ve never gone back, but a few years later I had told someone that story and they said that they’d heard a rumour about it from locals, so it seems that people remembered that story and stayed away.



  • That is a wild assumption with two key flaws

    1. Windows in many workplaces has updates locked down too, except in circumstances where critical security or vulnerability patches are pushed through.

    2. The same is true for many servers that run Linux.

    As someone that works on tier1 services for arguably the biggest tech company right now, that’s how it works in most of FAANG. Updates are gated, sure, but like with many things there’s a vetting process where some things that look super important and safe just slip through.

    In regards to your edit, I guess most cases are different from others, but if your entire business requires you to be able to use a machine 100% of the time then you should have the means to either use a different machine to continue transactions (ideally one with a known state that won’t change, or has been tested in the last few months). If you need to log transactions and process 24-48 hours later do that on something that’s locked down hard, with printed/hard backups if necessary.

    Ultimately, risk is always something you factor in. If you don’t care about 48 hours of downtime over several years, it’s not a huge concern. I’d probably argue that many companies lost more money during these days than they would have spent in both money and people-hours training them on a contingency system to use in case of downtime.


  • No. If everyone were on Linux and there was a breaking change introduced by a third-party there would be similar problems.

    The problem is that critical infrastructure isn’t treated like critical infrastructure. If something you rely on can go down due to a single point of failure, maybe don’t fucking use it?! Have backups, have systems that can replace those systems, have contingency! Slapping Windows on to a small machine and running some shitty Chromium app to work as a cash register is a fucking stupid idea when you consider that it is responsible for your whole income.

    The problem was never Windows. It was companies that were too cheap to have contingency, because an event like this was considered extraordinary and not worth investing in.