Dagon @dagon@schelling.pt

I am at least a bit suspicious of HDMI-CEC debugging instructions that begin with: "Draw a large pentagram on the floor with chaulk." On the other hand, this might be the only viable path toward getting the damned equipment running properly. No pun intended, of course.

if you're responsible for a FOSS project, it's now time to consider how you can run your project without relying on the US.

like, using GitHub is fine. Continue using it - I do, too, and there's a lot of value of having projects centralized in one place.

but you **need** to make sure you have a contingency plan. is your repo with all branches and metadata backed up somewhere else? do you own your project's website, discussion forums, or something else that allows you to point your users and contributors to a new place if you need to?

can you continue work on your project if US-big-tech decides your very existence is no longer allowed?

now is the time to take inventory and build backups.

2025. you go to a website. you see all the elements on the page pop-in, loading one by one. it's like the 90s again. your internet connection might be hundreds of megabits per second. the web designer is using a 4k video file as a looping background, and that somehow loads quickly compared to all the actual useful elements on the page. three seconds, five seconds, ten seconds. each checkbox and table has to initialize its own software stack of UI abstraction libraries and surveillance middleware

’Tis once again the season to hold this timeless holiday message close to our hearts.

Computer programming is what happens when you wish “I want to learn something new every day” on the monkey’s paw

PROGRAMMING TIP
avoid repeating the same 4 lines of code twice by writing 270 lines of beautiful, abstract, generic code

no no no *you* can't freely scan through the collected works of humanity, that right is reserved for the large language models.

Art.

Every time I do tech support for my family I get very angry about people who whine about lacking "tech literacy".

90% of the stuff I have to teach them is how to navigate manipulative software and dark patterns. This has nothing to do with tech, but with capitalism. Tech is not complicated, it is just made maximally confusing on purpose to remove agency.

Better tech ed won't fix this.

@lcamtuf

@eb "I never thought a sophisticated APT would backdoor *my* volunteer-maintained infrastructure that I got for free" sobs entire industry who voted for the "volunteer-maintained infrastructure that I get for free with no defense against sophisticated APTs" party

I understand that sending texts in meticulously capitalized and punctuated complete sentences makes me An Old and the thing is I am 100% fine with that.

A broken clock fixed by taping a working clock over it is a metaphor for every codebase you’ll encounter in your professional career as a software developer.

Concerns rising that using an "int" for the count of Trump indictments may have been a ploy for rollover to zero out his indictments entirely.

Annoying but true

One of the least plausible aspects of fantasy as a genre is that sorcerers NEVER seem to get bogged down in creating a new spell then spend the next three or four months muttering "I hate this, it's rubbish" under their breath.