calcifer @calcifer@hackers.town

Hello H.T

I've recently arrived from the Bauhaus, because you all have built a pretty sweet community here

I'm old, I'm all over the place, I get nerd-sniped on the regular, and I'm very enthusiastic about tech ethics

I like to fiddle with embedded stuff, particularly making stuff out of Arduino and LED pixels. I get cranky when "modern" means "we added complexity for no real reason". I think tech should aim for legibility and serve as a human enhancer; I get cranky when it's used to control or oppress or replace humans

I have no patience for stupid tech holy wars -- all hardware sucks, all software sucks, the documentation is provably incorrect, and the vendors all tell lies

I'm a dad -- so there will be dad jokes. I'm queer and polyam -- so there will occasionally be venting about that. I'm a nerd -- so there will be references and in-jokes aplenty

So. Guilty on all counts, including the murder charge. Good.

Despicable that police union is still arguing that kneeling on a man's neck for over 8 minutes is "appropriate use of force" despite the parade of experts explaining otherwise

Despicable that they say the officer was following his training and proper procedure despite testimony from his own department's leadership that he was not

Terrifying that I'm seeing chatter about people planning to get violent in response, because they think a unanimous guilty verdict resulting from overwhelming evidence of guilt is somehow a miscarriage of justice. I really hope it's just bluster.

Stay safe, everyone.

One of the fun things about using Raspberries Pi and the like for microcontroller-like projects: my wall clock is also the DNS and DHCP server for my LAN.

The flip side of this, of course, is that it means it's even more important for people who do have reasonable safety to speak about injustice and related problems

I really hate that people parrot "silence is complicity!" Yeah, sometimes.

But often it's safety. Not everyone is in a position to speak out safely on certain things. It's not complicit for someone to assess the likely minimal impact of them speaking up about something against their personal safety and decide it's not a good risk. Shaming them for it absolutely does harm.

You'd be stunned how many people's immediate personal safety relies on them being very careful about what they say on any given topic.

Instead of making progress on my looming deadline, I'm fighting my laptop's combination of new endpoint control software that's overaggressive and a version of Word that's crashing when I look at it wrong

My spouse and I are celebrating 22 years together today!

Ah yes, when trivia questions about Western movies, media, and sports are deemed "easy" but questions about the basic rules of common Asian sports/games are removed because they're "really really hard". Nice job, Team Diversity

I gave DEF CON a pass on using Discord last year because I understand that setting up and securing something at that scale on such a short timeline is risky af. It made sense to go with something with some problems that was known not to break and required very little time and effort

But apparently they're doing it again this year. Privacy problems and pending Microsoft ownership apparently not dissuading them or encouraging them to take up any of the many offers to run open platforms instead…

my fortune cookie wants me to watch the world burn

If you don't want kids, great: don't have them. If you need to vent about people pressuring you to have kids, I understand and support you

If you decide you're going to be a dick to kids because you don't want your own, though? Fuck you, you're a douche

If I were naming the Mortal Sins of computing, "imposing needless complexity in data structures" would definitely make the list

90% of the time that I see nested heirarchies (config files: looking at you) it would be better for everyone if the structure were flat key/value pairs, or at least close to it

"This meeting could have been an email!" Yeah, well, your weird nested set of object variants could have been a binary search tree, so

My kid (K) answering the question "What can you do to conserve energy?" for a school assignment:

"I don't really have a choice. I have to obey the laws of physics"

High five! Followed by a discussion about how grade school teachers are probably not asking about the laws of thermodynamics, so even if I consider that an awesome answer, it probably isn't what's wanted.

When people with disabilities speak up and ask questions, people get uncomfortable and show us the door. Especially when we're asking questions like "why did you build this thing to help people with disabilities without involving anyone with a disability?"

Empathy is great and all, but it requires understanding. And you can't get to understanding without engaging people as peers and whole individuals.