f.rift @feonixrift@hackers.town

What if the blue pills of our lives were right in front of us the whole time.

All parsers are inaccurate.
All data is dirty.
All statistics are lies.
All models are approximate.

If you stop the world to do it right,
the result will often be more wrong.
There is no end to the weird machine.

What would it take to actually win? I don't mean tread water and hold ground. I mean win. A future-proof free and open net, available to all.

I think OCAP is key. It's the only security model based on what is technically possible not on hype.

I think the IoT stuff that the folks behind the German covid trackers are working on is key, and I should get in touch with them again when I have the bandwidth. They're good at pushing privacy respecting design.

Governments that still have a stake in privacy and rights are key. Meaning not the usa, uk, nz, australia, etc...

Local-first and offline-first are a must; networks overall come and go but the net must in each locale go on. Whether by wires or by USB drives or by Bluetooth fistbumps in the hall.

Likewise old hardware support; obsolescence is for the employed.

A new data model, a new model of what a computer is and does and is for. A computer is for the user. Bring out your Tron memes, they're not ready to go on the cart. We're close to it with this exocortex / second brain talk, but take it a step further. Align in service to that.

Games can do it. Have done it. Remember Ingress? We should have taken that more seriously. But what does it look like in service to the user, end data holder first.

What does it look like when the only data sent is what you choose to send. When you can capability scope that to who needs to have it. When you control what runs on your device. What does that look like. Because it's glorious, and not out of reach.

Sometimes, let the future self you haven't met yet drive.

I didn't even double tap the power button. I pushed it, and the screen didn't turn off, and a significant sized moment later I pushed it again, and then Android parsed both presses at once and decided I'd doubletapped and dialed emergency services and THEN sat at a blank screen while it put out the call because it was still lagging causing a delay before I could tap to hang up. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE.

Release a glowing sparkle rainbow catgirl casemod for toughbooks and make bank, folks. That market segment exists.

As a techie, I should know that giving old hardware to others is fine but giving them my old hardware can lead to problems, because it probably already runs on sheer spite.

Original user complaint was "laptop's haunted," and yes this was a works fine when I use it.

New for #BOFH list -- zif socket disintegrated.

We all know we're plumbers.
It's a virtual world,
we can make anything visible.
The pipes are invisible.

be the clerical error you want to see in the world

Hack the planet like you want to have a planet left to hack.

For a true taste of nostalgia...

play Kansas - Dust in the Wind, backwards.

Please please con-going friends, vegas and desert and all, 🙏 no catching plagues.

I was trying to reboot my phone (to make sound work again, because Google bugs involving headsets and disabled audiostreams, but nevermind)... and my finger stammered on the power button. Just once. Because holding the thing down is hard to do steadily...

One flicker of pressure, one accidental bounce on the power button, was enough that instead of powering off, my phone dialed emergency services.

No, this 'feature' cannot be disabled. (Short of rooting the phone and manually yanking execution privs from a binary, which would make my financial apps Very Upset and abrogate the entire purpose of this particular phone.)

Android phones are unusable.

Camping with my uncle. Raising a teenager in a mundane apocalypse. Underpaid, despite my efforts to the contrary.

Because of how much current geek culture is embodied in, and referenced via, xkcd comics, this is a rather larger issue than it would initially seem.