I’m legitimately curious how many people have actually read their document. I just started the other day and I’m about 100 pages in. I’m glad to see people are starting to realize the amount of coordination going on within the far right. Straight up playbook for stacking the cards and consolidating power to the executive branch. Borderline unconstitutional type stuff.

I've argued this for point for so many years and have become exhausted to the point where I don't even bother any more.

Free software advocates, God bless them, are fighting a good fight but we will never see the average computer user giving up functionality for the sake of some computing ideology; whether that ideology be free software, privacy or security focused. I'm glad some people are willing to do so as I believe strongly that the world would not be where it is today if it weren't for it's existence offer the last two or three decades. But the reality is that 90% of the world views computers, phones and tablets as tools; a means to achieving an end, not the end in and of itself. There may be some subset of people who are willing to give up some convenience or utility if they believe strongly enough in one of these ideologies, but most of them will never care about the license of their software as long as it gets the job done. But this is precisely why we need people who do care about these ideologies because software freedom ultimately is important and people do benefit from it. It just needs to be as good as, if not better than, it's non-free counterparts

Boundaries. Establish them and defend them with every ounce of your being. If you don't, most employers will grind you in to the dirt and send you out to pasture when you eventually crack under the pressure. Better to establish healthy boundaries up front. Not only will you find yourself more frequently surrounded by people you like and share mutual respect with, you will be happier and land fewer "shit" jobs because employers looking for people to send to the meat grinder will see that they can't grind you down and you'll be filtered from the hiring pool before you ever have to suffer at their hands.

100%. The rebranding of some HR departments as "People Officers" or "People Team" drives me bonkers. When push comes to shove, they will always protect the interests of the business before the interests of the employee. Full stop.

There's a difference between complaining and providing constructive feedback. This post falls in the former category. If you are a user of a free product and you don't like how it works, you are entitled to a full, no questions asked, refund. You're welcome to make suggestions but devs who work hard to provide something at no cost and on their own time owe nobody anything. I've seen this play out year after year in the open source community and it's led to a lot of very good projects shutting down when the developer gets fed up with the demands and behavior of the community of users.

I’ll answer with a simple test. Do the following first on your phone and then on a piece of paper:

Design a thing, something physical; a box, a house, a chair, whatever. In addition to the diagram, this note must include a description of the item, the bill of materials, the dimensions and, if applicable, assembly instructions that you could confidently hand to someone else and have them follow. Ideally, you should include the dimensions of the object directly on the sketch itself.

Now give this to someone and see how accurately they can reproduce the item while you go off and make a phone call.

Exactly right. Facebook will factor this in as am expected cost of doing business (if they didn’t already) and their stock will go up. This isn’t a penalty, this is just like paying a bribe. In the end, both are just lining the pockets of officials more interested in appearing to do something for the next news cycle so they can get re-elected.

I love how there’s a whole generation of people who think that we went straight from email to to Slack and Discord. There was a whole, vibrant, ecosystem of XMPP and IRC services before these walled gardens showed up and supplanted open protocols in order to data mine their users.

I’m preaching to the choir in here, obviously, but we’ve been preaching this gospel for years and nobody cared. Not looking so crazy now. Unfortunately, the damage is done. Privacy has lost.

It's not necessarily idiocy. Dystopian, yes. And when you consider that the case for it not being idiocy is a government that has created such wealth inequality that people will do this for an extra $50.

For me the tipping point was when ads started becoming malicious. As long as ads are not static and are being served by unaudited and unregulated third parties, they have no home on my browser. I feel bad about it because I understand that some independent sites legitimately need the revenue but unless they provide information about how they vet their ad providers or they only serve static ads, I’m going to block them.

His utter lack of understanding about how SAaS companies work is astounding. Having worked on the backend of several, they’re all hot garbage and brittle. That’s why there were so many “useless” engineers. You know, the ones he shit canned when he acquired the company? Surprise, they were probably the only reason the dumpster fire wasn’t burning down the whole city block. The thing Elon fails to understand is that someone didn’t just write Twitter on one go and gift it on to the world. It has evolved over many many years. Technology stacks change, frameworks change, standards change and these companies are trying to continually add features to applications and don’t have the luxury of just rewriting the whole stack every time something new comes out. The end result is something that is often more akin to a living organism than a website or application. He probably thinks Twitter is some program running on every server that can just be rewritten and replaced. I can’t wait for the day they try to replace it and it ends up setting Twitter back a decade.

Get a couple of buckets of water and place them around your yard. Drop a “Misquote Dunks” tablet in each bucket. Follow the package instructions for refreshing the dunks every so often.

Mosquito dunks work by “poisoning” what looks to the mosquito like an ideal spot to lay eggs; a pale of still water. But the mosquito dunk bacteria kills the mosquito larvae before they hatch.

It’s a more “long term” solution as it doesn’t actively take care of the current mosquito population but it prevents them from breeding.

There is also a type of fish called the misquitofish that you can put in a small pond, such as a wash basin or feeding trough. They feed on the mosquito larvae and are fairly self sufficient. I know people who use them to control mosquito populations in their gardens and they rarely have to do any kind of maintenance.