Shannon Prickett @binder@wandering.shop

It's time! It's TeaTime Magazine time!

I am, you are, and so on, no longer the user for which 1password is primarily designed, because we don't make number go brr. CTOs are the customer, and the package is "use this, and you won't have to worry about credential breaches like the giant mess facing Github and Heroku." Telling execs that if their company uses your product, they can sleep at night, is worth exponentially more money than retail sales are.

"The tyranny of a movement without structure claiming that there is no leadership is a common scam known to Anarchism, where hidden 'shot callers' perpetrate the farce of equality, internal democracy, consensus process. It is worse when it is a corrupt and fraudulent white leadership designed to frustrate the desires of peoples of color to raise their issues and have representation in the movement. 1/2

Do you ever just listen to your keyboard as you're typing and think "how the fuck do the words come out of my fingers like that? Weird."

Hike down Mt Vision

Maybe it’s time to quote some stanzas from a poem that I generated from Twitter’s Terms of Service:

you have a Privacy
and a public profile
you must provide us
illegal goods or services

you install another application
and other account features
you are an advertiser
access or search the Services

you may be exposed
and Change of Ownership
you do choose to
your use of the Services

You can choose to
and any other appropriate
you with certain communications
or Content on the Services

listen, i'm glad everyone is here/back but platform metacommentary alone won't be enough to make this stick. you need to start posting inane nonsense

what did you eat today. did you see any cool bugs

Having been online from Usenet/IRC all the way up until now (whatever this mess is), two things have remained constant: 1) The nerds that architect digital social spaces never build in robust enough tools to allow all its users to adequately and easily protect themselves from harms in whatever way they need or see fit unless it suits said architects, and 2) people can be absolute shitheads

A couple of things that have been proven true in practice recently: first, the people who benefit most from zero-trust systems are people who shouldn’t be trusted. The primary utility of these systems is to give people who are not trustworthy a way to claim their untrustworthiness doesn’t really matter. That claim is demonstrably false.

I said this in a reply, but I would like to elevate this to a general principle:

Developers who think robust logging is pointless have the same contempt for their colleagues in operations that developers who think documentation is pointless have for their users.

Realization: appliance beeping is debugging information that's being surfaced to the user.

A tiger on a leash 🤝 A screwdriver
being able to wear you out

I'm interested in moving from mastodon.social to an instance where I am a paying customer; it would be especially awesome if the vendor also provided other hosted libre tools for paying customers, such as an Owncloud/Nextcloud or Jitsi/BigBlueButton instance. I welcome your recommendations & I welcome boosts.

@owen Hey, try this one on for size. There's a given value to a fresh email, in that it can be datamined and there's some value to the data. There's some smaller amount of value in an old email from a few years back, because you're not into the same things anymore. There's also a cost in disk space.

Remember when google deleted everyone's music? The cost of storing it was outweighed by the value it gave google, so they said oops sorry folks and just wiped it. That day's gonna come for gmail.

By the way, want to see a solar eclipse from the surface of Mars?

(That was a trick question. Of course you do.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKK7vS2CHC8

Foucault's idea of postmodern power - which he referred to, presciently, as "de-centered" - matches C.S. Lewis' notion of the Occult just as much as it does with cryptocurrencies. A set of nested self-referencing symbols of symbols of nested symbols without ultimate referent, whose real function was to beguile, distract and confuse the mind.

Like, a pretty major flaw with the city-builder genre in its current state is the fact that pretty much every major title (mainly SimCity and Cities Skylines) has a game world completely or near-completely devoid of any preexisting land use. No farmland, no established little clusters of houses or rural road system - just an unspoilt wilderness for you to do with as you please.

This has some significant impacts re: ingrained colonialism (which I'll get to in a moment), but it also just results in really... unnatural, stiff cities.

Having roads, railroads, existing houses, etc. creates a framework that a city "fills in", lending a sense of history and growth to the places you make. This block of housing is this shape because that was the shape of the field it used to be; that thoroughfare is at an angle to the streets around it because it was there long before they were.

In contrast, cities built without that framework become repetitive, uninteresting. Terrain can provide some of that, but only so much, and you end up with boring grids and samey subdivisions. Imperfections have to be added by design, and they aren't quite the same as ones the player didn't choose to have.