• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Assuming you like eating chicken, when is it wrong to pair chicken with vegetables? I made a vegetable-mushroom-chicken soup last week and it was delish. Whether chicken is or isn’t a vegetable is an academic concern, not a culinary one.

    Try putting mushrooms or chicken in the sangria however and you’ll be rightfully prosecuted for crimes against humanity.



  • It’s a mixed bag. Tintin au Congo isn’t “borderline racist”, it’s violently and unapologetically emblematic of deep unquestioned colonial racism at a time where the Belgian Congo was only a few short years removed from genocide and chopping hands as a matter of colonial policy. It’s shocking even for its time.

    The anti-imperialist messaging in the Blue Lotus is a nice sentiment (this was the '30s and Japan being the bad guys was an unpopular opinion in conservative European circles at the time) and that marks his turnaround on these reactionary views as he wrote the Blue Lotus in collaboration with an actual Chinese friend of his. However criticizing Japanese imperialism through racial caricatures of the Japanese occupiers is more than a bit gauche. Collaborating with the occupier during WWII to get published also didn’t earn him any good boy points and actually got him banned from publication for a spell.

    I’m not gonna freak if a young relative of mine is reading Le Lotus Bleu or whatever, but it’s important to keep in mind the flawed and narrow worldview of its author.



  • THANK YOU.

    I migrated services from LXC to kubernetes. One of these services has been exhibiting concerning memory footprint issues. Everyone immediately went “REEEEEEEE KUBERNETES BAD EVERYTHING WAS FINE BEFORE WHAT IS ALL THIS ABSTRACTION >:(((((”.

    I just spent three months doing optimization work. For memory/resource leaks in that old C codebase. Kubernetes didn’t have fuck-all to do with any of those (which is obvious to literally anyone who has any clue how containerization works under the hood). The codebase just had very old-fashioned manual memory management leaks as well as a weird interaction between jemalloc and RHEL’s default kernel settings.

    The only reason I spent all that time optimizing and we aren’t just throwing more RAM at the problem? Due to incredible levels of incompetence business-side I’ll spare you the details of, our 30 day growth predictions have error bars so many orders of magnitude wide that we are stuck in a stupid loop of “won’t order hardware we probably won’t need but if we do get a best-case user influx the lead time on new hardware is too long to get you the RAM we need”. Basically the virtual price of RAM is super high because the suits keep pinky-promising that we’ll get a bunch of users soon but are also constantly wrong about that.


  • Being able to assign a nameserver per interface with a domain wildcard is a fucking godsend. I use it every day with a hook script because my job uses some private domains but I don’t want to send my entire DNS history through the VPN. Now ~job.com goes to tun0 and that’s the end of it.

    systemd-resolved is not perfect but with libnss’s overly rigid nature the only alternative for my use-case would be to recreate similar functionality to resolved with dnsmasq – which is just objectively worse especially when you want to use DHCP sometimes but not always. Why reinvent the wheel? resolved does its job and does it well. I had some issues with it a few years ago but have been using it for the past couple years without complaint.


  • There can’t be a war when one of the sides is not fighting nor willing to fight.

    I’m not calling for anyone to do anything, just pointing it out: None of the people in charge of any institution nominally opposed to Trump are willing to even come close to that line. Do you really think there is a world in which any blue state governor would authorize any use of force against the feds? And if you can make up a contrived scenario where this does happen, can you imagine it escalating to the sanctioned use of lethal force?

    There are factions within MAGA who have drank their own kool-aid so hard they actually think that there are Antifa militias out there and that they can gaud them into giving them a Reichstag Fire. That is lunacy, typical fascistic paranoid violent fantasy.

    If they can’t speed up their authoritarian takeover that way, they will simply keep going with their current strategy of slowly overturning all jurisprudence until eventually blue state leaders will politely roll over, invite ICE political officers to oversee their operations, smile, and forward the order to send their children to Trump&Ghislaine’s Fun Family Camp.



  • ??? Of course you do. Investors don’t just buy their way into hypothetical future profits, they buy control over the company. The specifics depend, whether it’s voting shares or the looming threat of debt collection, but the courts will 100 % enforce investors’ right to demand things from companies.

    Furthermore the idea that publicly traded companies have some kind of obligation to make as much money as quickly as possible is a reddit-born myth. Shareholders will bring in a CEO, who will be tasked to do whatever and can be fired from the shareholders at any time. Grievous mismanagement and intentional damage can expose a CEO to legal action, just like intentionally destroying tools can expose a worker to legal action. But a CEO acting in good faith has no other obligation than to fulfill the tasks asked of them by shareholders. The problem is that goes wrong when large shareholders plan to sell their shares and need the numbers to look a little better to sell a little higher. But this phenomenon absolutely happens with PE as well – in fact it’s arguably way worse because publicly traded companies at least have legal obligations of financial transparency. Private shareholders can do whatever the fuck they want, including secretly selling their shares to Evil Inc. for them to strip the company for parts and not a single employee has the right to even know who the majority shareholder even is, nervermind what their plan is.


  • That’s worse. You see how that’s worse, right?

    The entire premise of this accursed property is “structural change is definitionally impossible and evil-natured people cannot be helped so let’s see how Batman brutally maims victims of this system to defeat the villain-of-the-day”. This is such a profoundly repulsive ideology to me. It’s not about the in-universe justifications, it’s about the horrible, awful, despicable themes of the stories that glorify hyper-individualism and completely discredit democracy, civic institutions, and community.

    The in-universe explanations were just tacked on to those core reactionary ideals. The writers didn’t stumble on a cursed city, they invented a cursed city to justify their need for vigilantism and violence to be the only rational answers to society’s ills.


  • Did Marvel really have a lot of those? I think the main issue is they had too many villains, period. Most of which aren’t misunderstood, merely forgettable. Hero’s Journey + Scary Villainous Antagonist is not the only story template out there.

    The problem is most marvel movies aren’t trying to tell a meaningful story with (inter)personal conflict and character growth, but to move their characters along from hijink to hijink using rote storytelling techniques.

    There’s nothing wrong with having a BBEG, or a nuanced villain, or even a morally correct antagonist that is only pitted against the protagonist through happenstance. There are Great stories that use all of those tropes. The only relevant question is what story is being told and which antagonist best helps move it forward.



  • Worse, those of us who have been sticking our neck out and saying “hey guys let’s maybe slow down a minute on investing into things that have no foreseeable path to profitability” are getting passed over on career advancements while hype-chasers are getting rewarded.

    Life ain’t fair man, especially when you have a passing interest in understanding wtf is going on and a moral compass that tentatively points towards not actively and knowingly making the world worse.


  • I can’t be fucked to find the graph but it’s true. The relationship between speed and exhaustion is highly asymmetric, going 20 % slower than your default walk is much more tiring than going 20 % faster.

    It actually makes intuitive sense to anyone who hikes. Walking slow is like hiking downhill. You’re fighting your body’s natural cadence which requires extra energy that doesn’t go anywhere useful. Going faster also uses extra energy but it’s largely “useful” energy that spares steps. The extreme version of that line of thought is that I can run 10 km but not crawl 10 km.

    Also fast walkers tend to… walk a lot, it’s a virtuous circle. It’s fine if grandma does a lap around the mall at 2 km/h, but I’ve been walking all day and I have more places to walk to afterwards and I ain’t doing all that at crawling pace.



  • My dad’s Mercedes indeed beeps incredibly loudly (anyone sleeping immediately wakes up in a panic) if the blind spot sensor goes off… which it does as soon as you put your blinker on.

    Guess what that wonderful bit of tech taught my dad to do? That’s right, don’t use the blinker to change lanes if you don’t want your eardrums blown out.

    The fundamental problem is that car manufacturers aren’t being held liable for the accidents caused directly or indirectly by these “safety” systems. There is zero oversight and no mandate to investigate false positives of these systems, even when they cause an accident. The end result is that for the manufacturers the point is not to improve safety but to do obnoxious safety theater so regulators look away from rising pedestrian deaths. “Sure our cars are one ton heavier, but they have automatic braking soooo we’re good right?”

    Who knows if these gadgets actually do anything or even if they don’t decrease overall safety. The manufacturer gets positive marketing, throws the regulator off their scent, and isn’t held liable for shit when the “safety” system fails or encourages bad habits. Win-win-win. Except the general public loses. But who ever cared about these schmucks?


  • I’ve never had anyone suggest the success I had in life was in any way related to someone wanting my dick in them no.

    You’re making it sound like this post is discussing pretty privilege. It’s not. It’s making a crass, misogynistic “joke” which hinges on the false implication that a woman is doing sex work for her success. But you already knew that and are just pretending otherwise. And if you think that misogyny is acceptable because it’s “how the world works”, I would not-so-kindly ask you to fuck right back off to 4chan or the fox news comment section or wherever else you incels congregate these days.


  • I have been on twitch before sex workers even got a foot in the door. If you think that’s what “80%” of twitch is about then you either don’t watch or are telling on yourself.

    Anyway whatever you think of sex work is literally irrelevant to the conversation. The woman pictured is not a sex worker and implying that she is for the sake of an incel joke because “she’s pretty, that’s close enough to sex work for me” is misogyny and you need to take a long hard look at yourself.