Life is Tetris @tetrislife@qoto.org

@nano I’ve been thinking this exactly for years! Computers don’t need to get better… software does!

@jalefkowit You can keep your skills current or you can write a little web app. I'm not sure you can do both.

You run a #FreeSoftware project? This is your occasional reminder to move away from #Discord and #Slack and other #Platforms.

As convenient as they seem, every "platform" is a #WalledGarden. They can and will pull the rug from under you any time it's in their interest, without regard for yours.

Migrate your community to systems under community control. Before it becomes a crisis.

https://en.osm.town/@amapanda/111771768413699746

#ProtocolsNotPlatforms #DataSovereignty #SelfHosted

It's like how we ask athletes to be superhuman and when they get caught doping we commence the ritual of pearl clutching and performative teary-eyed mea culpas. What did we think was happening? It's called publish-or-perish. We explicitly judge academics based on how much they publish. Of course ambitious people take risks to juice those numbers -- that's like the definition of ambition.

@amcewen @gilest we used to be able to publish stuff by dragging files into a folder called "Public" (or public_html on some Unix systems). Maybe we should make that work again.

There is a special circle of hell for lackeys who legitimise surveillance capitalists like Facebook and aid their efforts to take over (or at least sabotage) emergent non-corporate spaces like the fediverse when they should be protected from them at all costs. Those who give them every benefit of the doubt and temper all historic evidence of wrongdoing with anecdotes of the very good people they know, working there in good faith. You know who you are and exactly what you’re doing. Shame on you.

Did you realize that we live in a reality where SciHub is illegal, and OpenAI is not?

@alex A picture is worth a thousand words, but takes up the space of a million of them.

@surendrajat @cendawanita It is the Hindi dialects and folk cukture that are rotting away. How many of you listen to Kajri, Hori, Thumri, Dadra etc.. Do you guys speak in your native dialects in cities? At least at home?

I being a Keralite perhaps know more Thumris than an average UP fellow of today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uhossX4UXs

Most of us don’t know exactly what we want, but we’re pretty sure we don’t have it!

The key to a great Mastodon experience is finding and following #hashtags you find interesting. Doing this has allowed me to find all sorts of interesting people and blogs lately. Some of my most enjoyable follows are:

#homelab #selfhosted #woodworking #3dprinting

Every time I upgrade my system I look at the list of packages and wonder whether I could uninstall some of them. I look at their description and try to uninstall them. That lists all the things that will get uninstalled alongside it and so the process repeats, lots of exploring of packages, and then, eventually, they're gone.
And when I reboot, it's my time to cry, maybe… at least that's what I fear. Going to reboot right now to get past that feeling of dread.

“We give power to what we give attention to. And we can choose.”

infosec advice: don't use computers

@radiojammor Yeah, something that informed the piece but didn’t make it in is developmental economist Amartya Sen’s famous observation that famine doesn’t occur in a functioning democracy—the many famines in many regions over centuries of British control were anthropogenic.

My weekend project was to build a Mastodon bot, and I'm pumped to say it's now live:

@BookchinBot is a simple bot that posts quotes from philosopher and social theorist, Murray Bookchin.

I came across Bookchin's work during my PhD, and found it both important and relevant to the issues we're dealing with today.

So, if you're a nerd about theory like I am, this bot might be for you.

#socialtheory #politicaltheory #philosophy #ecology #socialecology

I said this before on the bird site but it really is true; I distinctly remember reading Ayn Rand as a teenager and thinking “this is some real bullshit she is trying to pull here”. As pulp it is fine, but this is not a serious philosophy for serious people.