did an outsides

@attoparsec thanks that would be really helpful! i started looking at options for epaper displays, but now preferring lcd again just for the idea for watching tv by putting the matching card in :)

@attoparsec when i saw your first post about this project i also had to get one of the toys to mod :)
excited to see your project progress cos by the time i get to doing mine i can just copy a bunch of your solutions heh :3 (in the nicest possible way :)

very long shot: do i know anyone who knows anything about linux's schedutil CPU governor?
i have this old microserver and the clock never leaves the lowest frequency (unless i tell it to manually). i have checked A Lot of things and everything looks correct, it just does not do anything even under high load.
it's a basic nixos install, but from everything i have checked i would be surprised if it's a disto specific issue.
#linux #kernel #linuxkernel #nixos

@Foxocube i am very happy to do the internal audits :p

@foophoof meow! no!

petition to change the prefix "hypo-" to "lowpo-" to avoid oh so much confusion and mistakes

after like 2 days of confusing faff, i finally figured out how to get nixos to build a derivation of a maven project with external precompiled build! (cos protobufs)
and it only has like 2 nasty hacks!

now i Just need to figure out how to get JNI to find libvlc...

(usual rant about loving nixos but the learning curve is a brick wall)

you may fascinate a woman by giving her a piece of industrial test equipment

A thought for trans allies in this time:

You often ask us what you can do to help. Well, here's something you can do. Wear trans badges, buttons, pins, scarves, whatever you've got. Explicitly. I wanna see that blue and pink EVERYWHERE.

Because the more of you cis folk do that, the safer we will be in crowds and such. It will mean that wearing a badge of support for trans people doesn't necessarily out that person as trans.

"But wait," you're thinking maybe, "if I do that, people might think *I* am trans!"

Well, why is that a problem for you? Would you be offended by someone thinking you might be trans? Would you be scared? Welcome to our world.

This is your time, cis people. You were all ready to call yourselves allies when it didn't matter more than changing your PFP background. Now the rubber meets the road. We need you. We need your help to normalise our existence to other cis people. It could save lives.

If someone accuses you of being trans (imagine being *accused* of existing while trans?), don't deny it. Ask why it matters to them. Keep calm.

#LGBTQ #trans #allies

I really cannot stress enough how much of an unexpected marketing gift the term "vibe coding" has been for us.

If you’re affected by the IETF LLC’s inaction, or just find the body in charge for designing the Internet we all rely on to be in the wrong here; I invite you to sign my open letter to the board: https://boycott-ietf127.org

@q is that basically "more people must be harmed before we will do anything"? wtf

welcome to 2025 where mainboards have 7 different kinds of USB ports

me: debugging a buttplug.io integration
me: "is this vibe coding?"

first time trying to use esp-idf: instructions on getting started are pretty good but getting the output of the hello world app to actually show in the console was super confusing cos by default they are sent to the uart pins and not back over the usb port to the monitor along with all the other debug msgs and the hello world instructions totally fail to mention this scenario despite most esp32* boards these days having multiple uarts meow sighhh flops
(answer: there is an option hidden in menuconfig)

Taking a moment to affirm reality:

In English, the words "gender" and "sex" are synonyms.

If you are in a situation you need to decide whether to write "gender" or "sex": write "gender". If you write "sex", there is a risk of it being ambiguous whether you meant copulation.

If someone says anything different from the above, this means one of two things:
- They took a Women's Studies course between exactly 2005 and 2007 and overly internalized something the teacher said then. Or
- They're fash

Imagine if the boy who cried wolf had actually seen a wolf every time, but by crying wolf he scared the wolf away. The villagers would show up, and there's this boy pointing at the forest and saying they just missed the wolf and weren't they lucky he had been there to warn them. And the villagers would probably take that badly, after the first time. They'd probably write a story about it.

Meanwhile, the boy is scared shitless. On the one hand, there's this fucking wolf who is getting more and more brazen. Maybe next time the boy won't be able to scare the wolf away. And then not only will the boy be in trouble, but the village will be in trouble. Meanwhile on the other hand he knows that if he keeps crying wolf, either the villagers will stop showing up at all, or they'll view him as a bigger problem than the wolf. Either way, the boy is going to be in deep shit there too.

You might forgive the boy for getting the fuck out of dodge. Let someone else watch for wolves. See how they like it. But he doesn't. He stays and watches, and the wolf comes back, and this time none of the boy's cries drive the wolf away because the wolf can sense that no one from the village is coming. And the villagers stand by and listen to the boy's increasingly desperate screams until it's too late.

Who's the hero of this story?

Now, if you were a villager who had just committed negligent homicide by wolf, which turned out to have been a very real risk, you could do two things. You could learn from this experience that sometimes warnings should be heeded regardless of whether they seem to be false alarms because it's better to go out to defend the flocks from a wolf a thousand times when there's no wolf than it is not to go once when there is. That's the sensible thing to do, certainly. The money is on overreacting if overreacting is low-cost and the risk of under-reacting is high.

Or you could write your story about this boy who fucked around and found out. That makes you look better, I guess. And it relieves you of responsibility for defense of the village and your livelihoods. The boy should have known better.

You may have figured out that I'm not talking about boys and wolves anymore.

We have a whole classic parable on the subject of not crying wolf, to the point where "crying wolf" is something of a dead cliché. In the English-speaking world, pretty much everyone knows what "to cry wolf" means, even if they've never actually heard the parable. We don't think about the story. We make the semantic leap from the phrase to "false positive." And we are taught over and over that crying wolf is always bad.

Which is why we find ourselves in situations like the one in which we currently find ourselves. We are victims of survivorship bias: we only remember the times when the warnings seemed unfounded because if they had been founded we wouldn't be here to notice. Fascism stalks the forest like a horde of hungry wolves, but because we only remember the times when fascism didn't eat us, we think all warnings are unfounded. Never mind that in most cases not only were the warnings founded but the action taken in response to those warnings was what kept fascism at bay.

Look at Y2K, which, if you're too young to remember, was something of a joke. It was regularly held up as a giant cry of wolf because, well, the world didn't end when the clock ticked over. Very little happened, really. So everyone breathed a sigh of relief and immediately set to work making sure that we forgot some inconvenient facts.

Y2K "didn't happen" because a lot of unappreciated work was done to keep it from happening. A lot. Far more than we were told in the general public. This was, after all, the era of Reaganomics, when the Democrat who was in office was about as conservative as a lot of Republicans were, where it seemed like everyone had a hardon for gutting government spending and bureaucracy. So the unsexy work of making sure that the world didn't end was just waste, right?

What about September 11, about a year later? Turns out that there were large numbers of boys who had been crying wolf about Al Qaeda for years, but a lot of unappreciated work was done in an attempt to keep that wolf at bay. It wasn't going in guns blazing, and it wasn't necessarily the ideal way to do it, but it also wasn't sexy so no one paid much attention.

Pandemics past have been averted and turned into jokes. Swine flu? Huge joke. Bird flu? Nothingburger. All wolves which failed to eat us, largely because someone cried and then unsexy work was done because of that warning. But we don't need the CDC. It's a waste of taxpayer dollars. After all, what has it ever done for us? There was never a wolf to defend against.

We teach our children what we want them to know. And what we want them to know is that it's always worse to be an inconvenient Cassandra than a dead Tiresias. It's better to hold your tongue and let the wolf eat everything than it is to give a warning too soon, before you can see the whites of its eyes as it were. Keep your powder dry. Don't be too hasty.

And what's the life of one annoying boy, after all? And another. And another. Something keeps eating the boys you send out to watch the sheep, but as long as they don't cry, you don't have to deal with that. Teach your children silence. There might not be a wolf after all.

[EDIT TO POSTSCRIPT: There's good stuff in the replies. I know that fedi makes it hard to see replies sometimes, and I know that frequently replies are unreadable garbage anyway, but in this case several excellent points have been raised by people other than me which don't really work without context, but you're reading this so you have context, so go read them.]