Good post on linkrot by @pluralistic

"38% of the web of 2013 is gone today. Wikipedia references are especially hard-hit, with 23% of news links missing and 21% of government websites gone. The majority of Wikipedia entries have at least one broken link in their reference sections. Twitter is another industrial-scale oubliette: a fifth of English tweets disappear within a matter of months; for Turkish and Arabic tweets, it's 40%."

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/21/noway-back-machine/

It is very annoying that F6 is how you unfocus the address bar in Firefox.

Dear Hackers,

Public libraries, and libraries in general, are not your enemies. They are some of the last places in the world where people can go, hang out, and do things without any expectation of money changing hands. They are a physical manifestation of file sharing and a corporeal form of torrenting. That in mind, libraries are chronically underfunded and they're currently under attack by right-wing politicians and fascists, but I suppose I repeat myself there.

As such, they make lousy targets for ransomware attacks. Chances are, you're not likely to see any money because they have no money to pay you. All you've done is hurt those who are less fortunate than you, you've hurt children, you've hurt students, and you've made no progress towards "sticking it to the man" or whatever.

For god's sake, leave the library alone. Or maybe, come visit one sometime.

Thanks,
Cyberpunk Librarian

https://shelftalkblog.wordpress.com/2024/05/28/an-update-about-access-to-library-technology-systems/

Been a week using Aerospace, and I’ve finally found a window manager for macOS that works for me.

TIL: when running software in chroot, there is no /dev, so /dev/null can end up being a regular file, and then reading from /dev/null is a surprise.

The creator of Uiua (pronounced “wee-wah”) might prefer “Uiuan” as the demonym, but “Uiuaboo” is just too perfect.

Journal: Trust

How to destroy your greatest asset with AI.

🔗https://adactio.com/journal/21160

A little fun from the FT. Apparently they don't care for American paper sizes in comparison to ISO 216 and I appreciate the poetry with which they express this. 😀

The culture war over gender affirming Healthcare so frequently ignores the fact that only a small percentage of gender affirming care is actually for trans people. The majority is for cis people who are accessing it for the exact same reasons as trans people, feeling more comfortable in their gender identity.

I was prescribed spiranolactone because my body makes more testosterone than I want it to, and as a girl I do not like having excessive facial hair. Easy easy, doctor tested my blood and wrote the prescription. I didn't have to prove anything other than I wanted less facial hair, and because I'm cis everyone involved trusted that my personal preferences and discomfort were enough to give me what I needed to solve the problem.

Most top surgeries are performed on cis men (to treat gynecomastia and create a more masculine chest) and cis women (to create a more feminine chest). Most hormone therapy is given to cis people to help them comfortable in their gender.

Dissecting a mitre. #dissection #mitre

love this post “Instead of "auth", we should say "permissions" and "login"" by @nicole.

it's a great explanation of how using less jargon-y language can be more clear. Also I've been really enjoying her blog generally.

https://ntietz.com/blog/lets-say-instead-of-auth/

V. good on man vs bear

https://bikepacking.com/plog/man-or-bear-debate/

good day: got to post my favourite gzip fact

(you can concatenate gzipped files together, and you still have a valid gzip file. it will uncompress as if you concatenated the inputs then compressed them)

Forever prioritizing action items of the latest incident is Management By Most Recent Fire.

Hadn’t had my coffee yet, saw this headline and thought, “what could Al Yankovic have done to deserve this?” #WeirdAl

do you ever think about how, for years, we used X- or x- in front of experimental or yet to be standardized names, only then to find that the x- prefix had fossilised

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6648

Finally got around to reading https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/what-precious-things-does-the-corporate-world-steal-from-us/ and it reminded me of the project that I probably enjoyed the least, where I actually got a fair amount of intellectual stimulation, though not because of the actual work, but because I wound up commuting early to skip traffic and spending an hour at the Starbucks near the client site just reading papers and whatnot. Weird. But I do miss having chunks of time that encouraged reading like that.

If I had to start a new series of tech books, I would call it "Shattering your dreams about X".

This would be books about the hard realities of doing X for when you realize all the hard topics of operating X on a daily basis are not covered by the "it's going to be sooooo easy" official docs.

Like:
- "Shattering your dreams about k8s",
- "Shattering your dreams about GitOps",
- "Shattering your dreams about the self-organized team",
- etc.

End of an era- ICQ will stop working on June 26. 😢

https://icq.com/desktop

#ICQ #internet #history