me: “which of the pickwick triplets did it” is the song of 2023
my spouse:
me: wait what year is it
him: 2023
me: nailed it

On Oct 3, 1925, Simone Segouin (nom de guerre Nicole Minet) was born in Chartres, France. She served in the French Resistance in the FTP (Francs-tireurs et Partisans), a communist group fighting the Nazis. Her wartime exploits included derailing German trains, blowing up bridges, & capturing 25 German prisoners as an 18 y/o during the fall of Chartres. After the war she worked as a pediatric nurse in Chartres. She died Feb 21, 2023 at age 97.

#WW2 #Resistance #Antifa #Herstory #France

every woman in academia needs to stop and read this 2021 profile of Katalin Karikó. it’s enraging and inspiring all at once.

and every man should read it for a very simple reason:

🗣 THIS IS WHAT A REAL GENIUS LOOKS LIKE

not Jobs.
not Musk.
not Zuckerberg.

not 99.99% of the Silicon Valley conartists calling themselves geniuses.

no.

it’s this middle-aged mother who works at a lab.

❝ Messenger RNA vaccine pioneer Katalin Karikó shares her long journey

https://www.statnews.com/2021/07/19/katalin-kariko-messenger-rna-vaccine-pioneer/

Thinking of cancelling more subscriptions to big companies so I can give the money to artists instead.

I started doing this earlier this year and strongly recommend it.

Also rewarding: cancelling music streaming services and instead using the money to buy albums from bands.

‘Henry Ford invented the 40 hour work week’ is a very strange way to say ‘Henry Ford claimed credit for changes he was forced to adopt after a hard fought campaign by the union members he despised’.

"If all you have is an MC Hammer, everything looks like you can't touch it"

- ancient proverb

There we go - the technological #enshittification pandemic has also reached Philips #Hue.

Apparently they weren't making enough money by selling bulbs at $50/70 each. They'll now force you to log in through their app to the bridge too, or all of your bulbs will just stop working.

What this means, among the other things, is that tons of unofficial integrations that have been built over the years (phue being one of them, which I contributed to in the past, and is also used by Platypush to interact with Hue bridges) are also likely to stop working once you upgrade your bridge's firmware. Those integrations leverage the old push-the-pairing-button mechanism to pair with the client, but now in-app authentication through a registered account seems to be a requirement - and I definitely have better things to do with my time than reverse engineer again their shitty authentication flow and push a PR to phue.

Philips Hue (sorry, Signify B.V.; Philips has actually given up on building anything, they're just waiting for everybody who works there to retire) has joined the long wagon of companies that have realized that scooping up as much data as they can from their users (that probably includes at what time you usually wake up and go to sleep, from your bedroom lights patterns, or how often you go to the toilet) and selling it to data brokers provides a much steadier revenue stream than selling actual products that people want (even if those products are already quite pricey). And they don't care if fullfilling their new missions of being a mere data collector rather than a tech company means to literally break overnight the lights in the houses of millions of customers.

Of course, I was kind of prepared for this. I have #Platypush installed on a RPi with a Zigbee dongle and zigbee2mqtt, and it already does the job for a bunch of Hue, Ikea and other cheap Zigbee lights. That's all you need to make your own Zigbee bridge. #HomeAssistant and #OpenHAB are other popular options.

But it'll still take me a while to unpair a few tens of Hue devices in my house that are still connected to my Hue bridge (which I purchased a decade ago btw), and reconfigure tens of groups, scenes and automation routines on my self-managed bridge instead.

I used to love being a software engineer, building things and solving problems. Now being an engineer sucks, even as a hobby, and I don't feel anymore like this is what I want to do with my life.

It's not up to me to decide what to build anymore. It's up to Spotify killing their streaming libraries, Twitter or Reddit killing their API, Hue breaking their products if you don't log in through their app, YouTube coming up with ways to break youtube-dl on a daily basis, Google breaking your browser extensions, Red Hat and Docker turning suddenly hostile towards the FOSS community that made their fortunes, Messenger periodically logging out your alternative clients and locking your account, an increasing number of companies who insult the large community of unpaid volunteers that builds against their ecosystems as "free-riders" and make it their business mission to break their implementations, and the list could go on forever.

I'm no longer working with ecosystems built by companies who genuinely want to build good things that people want to use, who treat the community of developers around them as an asset rather than a liability, and even sport "don't be evil" among their core values. I'm working in an industry that continuously takes hostile stances against the FOSS community, unofficial clients, and anything that doesn't fit neatly into the quarterly vision for profitability outlined in the PowerPoint deck of a sociopath product manager with no tech background, and who couldn't care less if they are selling IoT devices or bricks. And I have to dodge these attacks on a daily basis, one line of code at the time, for the hundreds of integrations available in the projects I maintain or contribute to, just to keep things working without losing features overnight.

I wake up the morning thinking "how will tech companies decide to fuck me up today just to get one more byte about me to sell to data brokers, and which activities will I be forced to put aside in order to write some code that fixes the UX-breaking shitshow that one of their greedy managers has decided to put up today in an effort to beef up their quarterly bonus with a +1% uptick in revenue?"

Congratulations, motherfuckers. Your broken business models have broken tech for everyone.

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2023/09/26/hue/

A little #owl with a little #hat.

Want UblockOrigin for life

Some kinda augmented reality that replaces all display advertising with classical art or gifs from /r/aww

Quote attributed to Banksy put it best:

Now with USB-C, 5x telephoto planet destroying laser, and natural Titanium dark side finish. #StarWars

Wow!😳 Texas teacher fired after assigning an illustrated Anne Frank book

Censoring one of the most important works documenting the Holocaust and punishing the teacher who dared teach it is pretty much in line with what fascists do. Horrific antisemitism.
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/education/article/texas-teacher-anne-frank-fired-18375331.php

@sml just don't squeeze it from the middle!

@paul_griffin "One more thing..."

Do you ever feel like a time traveler whose time travel machine has broken so you can't time travel past the bad parts?
#time #timetravel #ohwell

The received cultural mythology of 9/11 is so far from my actual lived experience of being an adult New Yorker on that day that it breaks my brain (and my heart) to even try to reconcile the two. For those who are younger, question nearly all of the political framing you hear about that day. All these years later, it’s clear Bin Laden got nearly all he wanted, thanks to the predictability of American reactionaries.

Classic.

Number of people who go bankrupt every year because of medical bills:

Canada - 0
UK - 0
France - 0
Spain - 0
Portugal- 0
Denmark - 0
Australia - 0
New Zealand - 0
Iceland - 0
Italy - 0
Israel - 0
Finland - 0
Ireland - 0
Germany - 0
Belgium - 0
Netherlands - 0
Sweden - 0
Japan - 0
Chile - 0
South Korea - 0

United States - 643,000

The fact that Nazis can walk through Florida without concern for their safety while trans people have to flee the state should tell you everything you need to know about today’s Republican Party.

so... what counts as "fart supplies?" #askingforafriend

@dukane I like Big Bezels... nah, I'm lying.