I donno man, seems like a lot of rich people piss is all over us

Sort of.

I was making a gigantic batch of mead. Like 5 gallons of it, boiling away merrily. I carefully prepared my glass carboy ahead of time and poured the must (aka: that-which-will-be-mead-after-yeast-farts-in-it) into my carboy. This was fine. All according to plan.

The bucket of ice and cold water I added to the sink to cool it down faster so that I could throw the pitched yeast into it... also according to plan.

What was not according to plan was a gunshot sound going off, shards of glass shooting through the air like a grenade, and honey water cascading out over the edge of my sink all over my floor.

I've never felt more broken.

Full disclosure, I work for MSFT, but I do not speak for them. I fucking hate python and am forced to write it a lot while working here, but I want to suggest there's a complementary technological reason for wanting to run it in the cloud. This isn't to say that MSFT will stand to make more money if you are using their cloud services, and I don't have any insight at all into the "gib us money plz" side of this business.

The reason: One of the biggest headaches for IT depts has been attack vectors through office productivity suites. Download a sketchy excel spreadsheet from someone, and suddenly custom macros are purposefully creating avenues for attack, or are attacks themselves. Ken and Debra in accounting aren't security people. They got a spreadsheet from an email that seems superficially plausible, so they pop it open. Suddenly, your entire org is ransomwared just because two people who are just doing their normal duties get tricked.

That's why the ol' VBA shit and all those fancy macro systems from the past got neutered. Sandboxed and isolated, removed entirely, whatever. But a good feature gets lost.

Enter The Cloud, or in other terms, "Someone Else's Computer". As in, someone else's computer out there, far from your corporate network, that has no ability to reach back through your security perimeter and have a rummage around your business guts. The worst thing that will happen is the attack-vector-spreadsheet, itself, might be compromised. Or Microsoft's cloud computers, which are, again, not your computers.

Anyway, that's honestly a great reason for it. And there's also the business cat reasons, which I don't like in principle; I always begrudge businesses their attempts at squeezing us for more and more every single fucking day. So anyway, it probably isn't worth it to the average home user, but IT departments are going to be thrilled, even if the tech budget is going to get even fatter paying for all these users using someone else's computer.

I have strong opinions about home users who can write Python already but choose to use excel, but I'll keep them to myself. They're elitist and basically just me being a little shit, so... you do you, boo.

My natural inclination is toward black gallows humor in situations like these, but I have to keep reminding myself that a lot of people are going to get harmed and laughing is an unacceptable faux pas.

I also have to remind myself that "not knowing what to do with all these feels" may result in unhelpful reactions.

Yet I still want to stand on DeSantis' head and shout "what the hell did you damn well expect you fucking troglodyte". Feelings are tricky.

I don't use this word often, but I'm going to now.

Heinous.

For me, it's strictly because of this. I'm not suggesting truancy isn't an issue worth combating, but going at it this way showed a shocking lack of sense - to the degree where I'm not sure I could trust any grown-ass adult who would go along with such an idea for more than 2 minutes.

Dude, exact same as when I found out I was ASD. I didn't really know how important a label was until it explained so much and gave me a starting frame of reference to talk about with others.

I think I knew this with my head and heart, but it was at this point when I knew it with my gut. It has, frankly, been exhilarating, and I hope it's an accurate enough analogue for what my LGTBTQ+ family feel that I can better empathize with them.

edit: sometimes words are hard. like at least 85% of the time.

The whole situation reminds me of a water balloon battle I had as a kid. I kept getting some really good tosses in and one kid really didn't like that. I didn't have the wherewithal at the time to realize I was distressing him, assuming he was having the same fun I was having. Anyway he spent like 10 minutes trying to get the world's biggest water balloon created while he got soaked constantly and balloons broke like mad as he overfilled them.

Eventually, he managed to fill a particularly massive balloon. This thing was absurd sized, to a 9 year old. Properly absurd. I don't even know how he lifted it. But once he finally achieved his goal, he finally staggered to his feet with the balloon, roared a mighty 9 year old battlecry, and charged at me, only to trip on his own feet and tumble to the ground with his face impacting the balloon just as it exploded, soaking him. The meltdown was legendary; we all stopped playing, most of us just watching with bemusement at his misfortune. It was a huge own-goal, a massive self-own, and while I was certainly the motive, I had nothing to do with how it all played out.

I bet Greta feels a similar way, though she probably has way fewer conflicted feelings about the justice behind it, though.

i literally respect the uwu speaker more than the people crying cancel culture/woke

A few years ago it turned out a very promising python documentation library was using another library for a core aspect of the docstring comment parsing subsystem. I don't remember the names of either of these two, but as it turns out, the person who wrote the docstring comment parsing subsystem was someone who liked using the Nazi-Facing-Swastika as his repeating background image on his site and as textual glyphs to denote things like list items. He claimed it was everyone being too stupid to know he was using it in an eastern context, but he had an email like firstname_lastname88@gmail or whatever.

The point I made then is that even if FirstName LastName was running into a culture-shock situation, and even if they just happened to like the number 88 - or maybe they were born in 88 - there was simply no way I wanted to tie myself or my employer to that person. Nobody is going to extend any grace.

I guess I don't even think that is necessarily a bad thing. Why should people stanning genocidal authoritarian regimes be extended grace? Is it only okay if they can give us something, like a nazi scientist building space rockets? Is it simply because they gave you something you can't get anywhere else without paying more than you'd want to? I actually don't have an answer for this. I felt fine telling PossibleNazi88 No, and AccidentallyLinkedCompositionalLibraryAuthor Sorry, I'll pass, and in large part that is because Sphinx does exist and I can use it, even if I'd prefer not to. But what if this library were the only one? Would I just hold my nose and use it anyway?

Same with Lemmy - can I get it in a different package? A similar fediverse community package, without the gross genocide cooties all over it? This is a practical question; maybe this is reason enough to want to host a kbin instance over lemmy, eventually.

But philosophically: What if the next fediverse community package is from a Patriotic American, who has no problem with all the first peoples genocides and chattel slavery history because they believe in America so much that it's an intrinsic part of their identity?

It sucks because I want to make everything better, and I believe that to be true of Beehaw administration for sure as well, but navigating this shit is hard and even if you're principled you're probably only principled insofar as you're aware.

Conversely, doing the thing you know to be wrong just because the alternative is hard and maybe impossible isn't good either. But maybe you can use the genocide-fan's product to do more good than harm? But now you're back to nazi scientists making moon rockets, and nobody is happy.

I guess I'm just rambling while I admire the problem.

It feels so surreal to watch this train wreck in real time. This is a chief executive officer?

as the only straight person on the fediverse, I just found out that you are me. we are one.

neat.