I shall be laughing about bugles all weekend

Was asked if a slightly weird "civil defense" volunteer organisation is legit.

Went down a rabbit hole. Found this training slide.

I wasn't there, but I've read extensively about mass layoffs after the dot-com boom.

The difference between then and now is that somehow companies seem to think they can keep functioning after the engineering team has been laid off.

I know of a company who recently laid off the entire tech team bar one. The Martian, but it's AWS.

@hugh @kline @eloy This does not even register on my unhinged-o-meter.

I have a bluetooth fax modem still sealed in it's packaging.

The cats quickly learned they get wet upon entering our garden during the day.

Night however seems to be a constant surprise.

@popey Possibly relevant to your interests: https://github.com/infrastructureclub/travel_guide

It's extracted from our shared Google maps, partially as a backup/archive and partially so the data is more easily usable. We'd like to make the website better really.

@housepanther @zoul @bert_hubert The protocol was never designed to handle bad actors - everything grafted to it afterwards is an attempt to make it harder for them to operate, but all it does is raise the bar and you just get more technically capable bad actors.

Fundamentally spam is an unfixable problem in any federated system where anyone can contact anyone else cheaply without a preexisting relationship.

@housepanther @zoul @bert_hubert It's honestly just luck, yes! Fingers crossed for you.

The whole situation is awful and I hate it - it shouldn't be this hard, but unless something changes drastically email is a broken protocol that we all rely on.

@housepanther @zoul @bert_hubert Sorry, I was specifically talking about email - If your email server ends up on an RBL due to overzealous people hitting the spam report button, or you happen to be assigned an IP address that used to be on a blacklist, you are seriously screwed.

I've had this happen for personal servers, I've had it happen for massive mail operations, every time is a nightmare. I stopped running my own email server after over a decade because of an incident like this.

@housepanther @zoul @bert_hubert That is what everyone says until they operate a system like this when it *does* go wrong, and then you realise how absolutely screwed you are.

Yours: Someone who has done this many, many times

@housepanther @zoul @bert_hubert The problem is that books date quickly. Unless you have a living document it won't be usable in two years.

@housepanther @zoul @bert_hubert Fundamentally none of the self-hosting platforms are nearly mature enough to be operated by Joe Average, and they don't have enough funding to improve the situation substantially.

Saying that nextcloud/etc are comparable to gdocs/o365 is silly if you've actually used both of them in anything more than trivial cases.

I don't like this situation either and have serious issues because of it, but it's not a simple switch. I wish it was.

@housepanther @zoul @bert_hubert Setting something up initially is rarely hard. Maintaining it is. Fixing it when your friend who helped set it up is busy / away and you're non-technical is an actual nightmare.

If your friends can't recover this system entirely from backups without any assistance, they have a ticking bomb.

And let's not even talk about email deliverability.

@CatherineFlick ban them

@alex Excellent idea, I have a big knife switch lying around that needed a purpose

Automated cat defences yield a constant stream of entertaining videos

Bad news everyone.

Due to personal circumstances FKFJ would require sacrifices I am not capable of making this year. Sometimes you have to know when to pull the plug.

I apologise to those who were excited, and thank you to everyone who wanted to take part.

FJFK will return. Somehow I suspect it might clash with SXSW again.

https://fkfj.london

I have already managed to make this thing hallucinate devices, events, and entire fictional sections of the configuration language.

Working as expected. But at least the cats are getting sprayed.

@zuzak RAPIDLY ADDING MORE CONDITIONAL STATEMENTS

In case you are also in camp "I do not want to run home assistant":

Google home quietly gained a yaml-based configuration language and an LLM to write it for you.

Asked it to turn on the back garden cat sprayer when animals are detected, and yep, cats are getting automatically wet.

https://developers.home.google.com/codelabs/create-a-scripted-automation