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

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.

Today I got to blow a child's mind

my 10-year-old (Z): papa, how come you're always right?^*

Me: because everything I say is true, except this sentence which is false

*15 seconds go by*

Z: wait. What?! That's illegal!

^* this is a running joke that is made every time I'm wrong about something

Somebody has to sell erasers in the bi and pan pride flag colors, right?

PSA: always use a multimeter or probe to verify a circuit is off before beginning work

This practice saved my ass today, as the outlet I was working on actually had two circuits connected (one for each socket), and I'd only hit the breaker for the top one apparently

"But Cal, by that definition, almost anything is art!" YES EXACTLY

Barring extreme cases, every single human creates art in their life. Lots of art. It's one of the great and amazing things about humanity

To take someone's expression of that awesome trait and say "that's not art" is to deny them a piece of humanity, and I will fight you