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I think that, a little over four years after leaving the country, I finally have no bank accounts or any other ties in Hong Kong.

(They just abruptly cut off my ability to log in, but it was following a conversation about closing my account, so I assume that's what they've done. A more explicit confirmation would have been preferred, but oh well.)

I take this as a vindication of "no matter how late, still better than never" :)

in reply to Ben Millwood

I still have a phone number there actually, which is a little more difficult to let go of because I don't know who still has it and obviously if I cancel it I can't get that specific number back, but I guess once the dust has settled on this I'll be ready to let go
This entry was edited (3 days ago)


pix11.com/news/local-news/jayw…

I for some reason feel quite emotionally attached to whether I'm allowed to walk into roads or not, and am glad to see that freedom (which the UK has always had) spread a bit more in the US

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Ben Millwood

Jay walkage is unnatural, but it is also the thin end of the wedge. What's next, dogs being allowed to walk in the road?


This entry was edited (6 days ago)


something that raises my hackles probably more than strictly necessary: when people say "omg, thing X happened? that's so outrageous! if aspect Y had been different, this would never have happened, proving that people are biased along that axis" (e.g. "he never would have gotten away with this if he were a woman").

this is in some sense just one particular kind of appeal to fictional / imaginary evidence, but this one in particular bothers me because, a moment ago you probably would have predicted that thing X wouldn't happen either? so the fact that you still think a slightly modified X wouldn't happen doesn't feel that compelling to me, like maybe you're just not updating enough

(not all appeals to imaginary evidence are invalid, when they're good they're called "thought experiments", but often they're not good)





a friend just told me about Framework laptops and it seems like a compelling philosophy of laptop design: it's modular and user-serviceable, and indeed they ship it to you in bits with a screwdriver 😅

Curious if anyone here has had any experience with them. Some reports on the internet that they have fan noise / temperature troubles?

in reply to Ben Millwood

They're popular enough among hacker-types that typical linux compat issues seem to be mostly ironed out (suspend/resume, graphics, wifi, etc.).

The main reason I'm not using one is because I want a silicon root of trust that can attest to the integrity of the whole effective TCB of the platform, and only their chromebook variant has a plausible story of even attempting to (TPMs don't normally cover the embedded controller firmware), but last I checked the chromebook variants has pretty limited max specs (not enough ram for comfortably compartmentalizing desktop workloads into VMs with the desired granularity). This is understandable, since chromebooks are thought to be a low-end market segment, but still unfortunate.

in reply to Ben Millwood

I bought a Framework several months ago and I love it. I installed Debian. I was also worried about whether there were practical downsides, but to me the problems have been indistinguishable from the other laptops I've used.


does anyone want to play Factorio Space Age with me when it releases next week


mildly amusing UI hiccup in the Friendica 2FA options menu: github.com/friendica/friendica…
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)


Have you ever wanted to do something like cp -r, but doing something different for certain subpaths?

... You haven't?

Well here is how to do it anyway:

find . -false \
      -o -path . \
      -o -path ./log -exec ln -s /home/friendica/{} $out/{} \; -prune \
      -o -path ./view/smarty3 -exec ln -s /home/friendica/{} $out/{} \; -prune \
      -o -name .git -prune \
      -o -type d -exec mkdir $out/{} \; \
      -o -type f -exec cp --reflink=auto {} $out/{} \;

that is: don't do anything with ., with ./log or ./view/smarty3 populate them with a symlink and then don't descend any further into them, ignore any .git directory anywhere, and with any other path, copy it normally. (The -false is just so I can start every line with -o.)

(This example in particular could be ~mostly replicated with rsync --exclude and putting in the symlinks afterwards, but minor modifications would make that not work anymore; also, it's possible to combine the two symlink branches in this case, but it's ugly.)



the other day I was feeling bad about expressing needs and had a moment of "oh, I have cast myself as Gandalf", and it felt insightful at the time; it doesn't feel as insightful now but I am going to explain it anyway

The Gandalf archetype is capable and wise, and can solve your problem whether your problem is a giant fire demon or a moment of wavering courage, having both material and emotional skills. Gandalf is seen as important and respected by his peers, but he doesn't exactly want anything himself, it be a little bizarre for him to be needy at anyone. He worries on behalf of the world, and everything he asks of others is what the world needs, that he is simply a conduit for, not something for him personally. He wields and channels forces greater than any individual, in response to threats greater than any individual, and he as a person ends up abstracted almost entirely away.

sorry if you know more about Lord of the Rings than I do and this seems wrong to you; this status is not really about Gandalf :P

in reply to Ben Millwood

someone asked me how I feel about this casting and I want to clarify that it's bad for me, but I'm not yet clear on whether it's bad because though it would be good to be Gandalf, I'm not and shouldn't pretend, or whether actually being Gandalf isn't even good


I set up my own friendica instance for testing + potentially developing addons to propose to @Ben Weinstein-Raun . (Main experience: surprisingly large amounts of "this is broken, why doesn't it log anything anywhere?")

I've been away from PHP for a long time and had forgotten how normal it is that you put your code in all the folders that your webserver is configured to send to your clients, and you have to make some of the folders writable by the webserver or it won't work. I can kind of imagine lots of PHP-native people being like "sure, that makes sense" but it sounds so insane to me. How many security compromises would never have happened if someone early in PHP's development demanded better filesystem-level separation of code and data, and demanded that the places you could write to and the places you ran code from weren't the same places?

in reply to Ben Millwood

also @Ben Weinstein-Raun would you care if I packaged friendica for NixOS? I'm guessing no, but I've been enjoying packaging things recently so I thought I might as well ask (I think it's reasonably likely that I'll do it for myself, but if you care then I'll do it faster, and talk to you about what options would be useful etc.)
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Ben Millwood

I probably wouldn't; this instance is running a copy of the official docker container and I think I won't want to switch to something else


This entry was edited (1 month ago)


"soft inbox zero"


This entry was edited (1 month ago)
Unknown parent

Ben Millwood
I am guessing nobody checks emails more than a week old.


oh I definitely do! sure the value drops off over time, but I think for some things like "someone posted on a substack you subscribe to", reading it a year later isn't necessarily much worse than reading it in real time

I do think it makes sense to archive e-mails once you're like "even though there's something here, realistically I'm never going to do it", but I also think quite a lot of those things that you should have done some embarrassingly long time ago are actually still worth doing today



looking like I'll get credited as bug reporter for a Linux btrfs bug: patch and bug report

this is silver lining on how it has become harder over time for me to whole-heartedly recommend btrfs, especially to "ordinary" Linux end users... I think I'd still do it on balance? But I'd say a backup strategy is not optional. (But maybe I'd say that anyway.)

see also: my backup strategy

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

zfs has a couple of its own bugs that I've run into, e.g. bad handling of unplugged usb and terrible zfs diff performance. I don't feel super opinionated between them. zfs is a bit more aggressive about managing mount points and options instead of doing it via system configuration, which you might take as a good or bad thing. I find btrfs snapshots a bit more convenient to work with (they're just there on your disk, whereas with zfs I think you need to clone them to a new FS first or something)
in reply to Ben Millwood

Looking around on the internet for other issues just now, it's also apparently pretty common to run into showstopper bugs when trying to do zfs send or zfs receive on encrypted zpools. I've never tried it but that does seem pretty bad.

And yeah, that USB issue sure looks annoying :/

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Do you mean only with the native encryption? I use LUKS and I imagine it can't even tell I'm doing that?
in reply to Ben Millwood

yes, sorry, specifically with native encryption. afaik you're right that it doesn't know if it's running on top of LUKS
in reply to Ben Millwood



looking for recommendations in:

  • open-source server monitoring software (things like "e-mail me when the server is down", "e-mail me when the server is about to run out of disk space", and I guess optionally things like "record, store, and graph metrics like CPU and memory"); there seem to be a lot of options out there but I'd be interested in hearing anyone's personal experience
  • open-source issue tracker software -- similarly, there's a ton of them and I'm interested in hearing which ones people have had good experiences with. I'm mostly a minimalist here, with the exception that I want to be able to create ordered lists of issues (like GitHub projects).
in reply to Ben Millwood

btw, I've also spent a bunch of effort looking for decent issue trackers (open source or not) and have basically never found one that I like. FogBugz in 2006 or something was my favorite for a while, but I think at this point I'd find it limiting. So, if you find one that you like, I'd definitely be interested in hearing about it.
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

very briefly looking over that list, I notice two entries that I don't remember evaluating that seem potentially promising: Request Tracker and Mantis BT.

Ben Millwood reshared this.


today's shower thought: among spherical, flat, and hyperbolic geometry, flat space is the only one where geometry is scale-invariant. so it's the only one where you can have scale models of things! it's the only geometry that can support Warhammer 40k and that Zoolander joke about the centre for ants
This entry was edited (1 month ago)


in reply to Ben Millwood

The AWS flexiprocity server is now shut down (though I still use AWS for e.g. DNS)
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Ben Millwood

I ended up writing a PR for elm2nix that implemented the thing I want and today it was merged :) github.com/cachix/elm2nix/pull…


controvert: someone who gains social energy from arguing with people


markdown


This entry was edited (1 month ago)


limited-audience posts


I'm planning to write misc techy blog posts here. I wish when I wrote stuff for a niche audience, I had some way of saying "if this post is not for you, you can filter out posts like these". When I write a post there's a "categories" input field, but I don't yet know what they're for, and I don't see an easy way to configure my ignored categories (maybe this is what channels are for? but I think people don't look at channels / know what they are by default). For the sake of experimentation, I added a "meta" category to this post.

For the time being I'm just going to post stuff and not worry about it, but I'd be interested to hear from people who have already solved this problem.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Ben Millwood

Probably you don't want to do it this way, but in principle you could make a sub-user or even a group (i.e. a sub-user that auto-reshares things you tag it in) for this.

I do think you can use channels for this, by making a new channel that excludes the tags you don't want to see. I haven't tried it though.

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

I just enabled a content filter addon called N.S.F.W. (with periods removed) that lets you collapse posts that trigger simple rules including words, tags, or regexes. Hoping the performance impact isn't massive.
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

This does seem to have made perf much worse for me, I'm going to disable it again :/
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Yeah, I think a group is what I'd go for if people did complain it was noisy, but the drawback is that it's opt-in: people need to specifically follow the new thing if they want to see the posts.


latest solution to corporate malfeasance: build a giant magnet so you can yank your executives out when they're causing trouble
in reply to Ben Millwood

I can see why that might turn into the world's biggest construction project.


Is anyone using a mobile app (I'm on Android, but curious either way) to access this thing, rather than the browser experience? Though tbh I don't remember why I use the Facebook app instead of the website. It can't be push notifications because I've turned them all off.
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Sam FM

I've done this but it looks ugly:
194337275766e4c3db0bec2337391926-2.jpeg

Apparently this can be controlled with some shenanigans, see StackOverflow. I don't know if that's within the power of @Ben Weinstein-Raun to control?

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Ben Millwood

I think it's technically within my power, since I could go in and directly edit the template, but I'm hesitant to do so since it might result in trickier updates in the future.

Friendica Support reshared this.


wiki editing


!Friendica Support

I've so far been unable to sign up for a Friendica wiki account -- on original signup it told me it had e-mailed me, and when I try to reset my password it says it has e-mailed me, but I don't receive the e-mails (and yes, I checked my spam). I think my chosen username was "meblin" but I don't actually have any records of it, and I don't want to post the e-mail address I used publicly :)

wiki.friendi.ca/faq/wiki says I'd need to post here to get editing rights anyway, so I suppose I might as well do both at once.

My plan is to figure out more detail on how to authenticate to the API with OAuth, and then add more detail to wiki.friendi.ca/docs/api#authe… , so any pointers on that would also be useful :)

in reply to Ben Millwood

Looks like the email provider you are using has decided not to accept the mail from the wiki ;-)

I've send you a mail.

in reply to Tobias Friendica Support reshared this.

got your mail and my account, thanks :)

FYI it looks like the template for new user page has a broken netiquette link -- it has [[wp>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_in_technology|netiquette]] but should probably just be [[wp>Etiquette_in_technology|netiquette]] ? not sure where that's configured



friendi.ca API


This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Ben Millwood

@Ben Weinstein-Raun assuming you're on board with me using superstimul.us in this way, I might need you to create a consumer key / secret for me? I haven't been able to find docs on how to do this so far.
in reply to Ben Millwood

Yeah happy to try to do that! Once or twice when I was stumped I've found reading the Friendica source code surprisingly doable, if that helps
in reply to Ben Millwood

I just figured out OAuth and wrote my findings up on their wiki at wiki.friendi.ca/docs/api-authe…

I probably will integrate it with flexiprocity, but I'll probably take my time about it. I anticipate it being quite fiddly.