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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2020

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  • Matrix is defacto centralized around Matrix.org & servers they provide (where the cost of hosting makes it largely inaccessible to low-spec & medium-sized servers causing them to inevitably shut down & recommending users back to Matrix.org). All the metadata gets synced back to the mothership that was funded by Israeli intelligence. Avoid it.

    Cloudflare is a CIA front. They offer “free” DDoS protection + static proxy thereby giving Cloudflare the ability to MitM all TLS connections thru their servers. They convinced so many ‘developers’ via ‘influencers’ that every tiny site needs Cloudflare in front of it as a precaution/optimization, but it is an entirely premature optimization that doesn’t need to so widely deployed, but it is. 🤔

    Microsoft has always been an enemy but somehow managed to Trojan horse their way into the minds of developers again (neo-EEE) trying to centralize how software is created. Like we avoid Microsoft Windows, the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem should equally be avoided: Copilot, LinkedIn, Outlook, Exchange, Office, Teams, Azure, VSCode, npm, GitHub (Sponsors, Codespaces, Copilot). Literally none of these projects/services can’t be replaced to help protect the privacy of your clients, coworkers, contributors.




  • When other, non-native English speakers were invited to hangouts they were even more confused—asking me what he meant & I would have to look it up. In casual speech or storytelling these things don’t matter but when planning events & meetings they do. I have seen so many confusing scheduling issues in work & life that can be solved by just communicating clearly & precisely. I have seen meetings missed for time zones & ambiguous phrases like “biweekly”. You know what I do? I send an clear date & timestamp + *.ics iCalender file since I try to put events in my calendar since I can be forgetful, & it is almost no effort to forward it to the other interested parties. The other end then has a precise reminder that can be localized/translated however is clear to them in their calendar—& as a result no one has mistaken an event.

    Yes, the “obvious poor social skills” of being clear with folks when their time is involved. As well, trying to get someone else to give up their speech oddity in planning for the sake of everyone else, myself included, by explaining that others are confused & it not being worth it. Do you have experience working in international groups?




  • When you do not include a preposition like til or past or before or after there is no way to underestand relative to which side of the hour. This is why it is interpreted differently in some cultures. This is also why no one I grew up with ever said anything other than 5:30, 6:30 PM, or 17:3:0 since—aside from the 12-hour Anglophone clock thing—you can remove both ambiguity & doing mental math (also typing less characters).

    Funny when I first read about it: https://en.m.wikivoyage.org/wiki/English_language_varieties#Date_and_time

    Which had explicit instructions

    Some of these can be made less ambiguous (for example, Americans usually say “quarter past eight” or “quarter till eight”) but others will always have the potential for confusion. Be prepared to clarify, or simply use explicit dates and times.


  • There is no reason to be unclear with folks with some weird dialectal thing that is inconsistent across cultures when you aren’t in that culture… or to keep doing something on purpose when asked to stop for a couple of months. I thought it would be a one-time thing since I wasn’t feeling it that night, but everything ended up fizzling out after I guess my no show. We would chat if we ran into each other but neither of us planned anything together after.




  • I asked someone to stop saying “half 5” as a time since it was ambiguous & confusing, especially given that we weren’t in an English-speaking country & folks come from all over (many culture this means one thing or the other, while many—including where I grew up—don’t even use it as an expression). I asked a few times, then another time we were gonna meet up, I asked him “half five ha” “so what time do you really mean?” “half 5” …so I just didn’t show up, wasn’t in the mood. We haven’t really talked since.



  • toastal@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlWhat distro do you use and why?
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    7 days ago

    NixOS & OpenWRT are my two. NixOS’s Nix language as declarative config is such a great tool for setting up & maintaining a machines for the long-term that despite the initial learning curve has paid off in the long run (Guix or a Nix successor should also be in the same category). OpenWRT is the purpose-built tool it is for having an OS for a router with low overhead & a UI that can be easier to understand the config when networking isn’t something you do on the regular.


  • Dongles create additional & unnecessary points of failure in your setup (sometimes additional stress on the USB jack too which is usually your only I/O port (which is also making you choose charging or power)). Personal devices that play media need this standard jack that has existed for decades—& I refuse to play ball with these OEMs hurting customers.