That was another tard-ass Fat Acceptance “truth.” Diet is better for losing weight, of course. But exercise also helps. Always has been true, always will be.
Annoying
Plath of Most Resistance
My mom wanted to be some combination of Sylvia Plath and Janis Joplin.
What she ended up being was a mean, stabby drunk. Kind of a mega-fail there, really.
Backxactly Ackwards
Castro Podcasts — Things I got wrong: Support.
Castro is an opinionated app and I’ve thought a lot about what we’re building and what we’re going to work on next. It’s unlikely I’m going to implement the request. If I did, by catering more to persnickety power users, we run the risk of alienating newer users who don’t know how things work. But our power users probably aren’t going anywhere, at least they’re a little harder to shake, and alienating new users is the death of the product.
This is exactly backwards. But I think the piece accidentally reveals a fundamental misunderstanding that is very common to people who create software. The reality is that your power users are the ones who funnel new users to to you. Firefox never would’ve taken off without its power users; I personally got hundreds of people to use Firefox, many of whom never would’ve heard of it at all without my influence.
When they decided to kick their power users in the teeth for largely made-up post-hoc manufactured bullshit reasons is when that software began its long usage decline. The Mozilla clowns blame the power users (at least in part) for this, but in reality it’s those users who told them what would happen if they made the bad decisions they did. And they were right, as I’ve pointed out before.
Dustin’s counterproductive reaction — as it almost always is — is a power and pride thing. Power users are often completely correct about what would make your product better for everyone. But that rubs many creators the wrong way because it means more work, and someone else having at least some measure of de facto control, and that someone saw something that you did not. It means the software becomes less yours if you let someone tell you what would in fact work better for them. And many people (such as the Firefox devs) just enjoy having control over others.
I have nearly no idea what Castro is or what it does. It seems to be about podcasts, which means I’d never touch it. But Dustin’s contentions really misunderstand what power users offer in a software ecosystem, and what it means to alienate them.
For instance, I can tell that I’d never use Castro at all even if I were into podcasts because any creator who makes a point to shit on power users is one whose product I’d not even consider in the first place.
Where To Strike
TrueNAS is tons faster than the Synology — partly due to that it’s just on much newer, quicker hardware — but in many ways it’s amateur hour. And I want to punch whoever thought it should be so locked down right in the chigooblies. This isn’t consumer-class infra. Gramma is not going to send her money to Nigeria if you don’t prevent me from monitoring fans. And all because I don’t have a BMC?
Yeah, fuck you, buddy.
I don’t know that there is anything better than TrueNAS, alas. But it is free, and that’s something.
Ever Forward
Yeah, yeah, women have the Madonna/whore complex, but men are implored to always be the ones who must take action, criticized as weak and gormless if we do not, but then told we are evil if we do so.
Also no way to win there.
Too Tat
Correct. It’s also culturally-defensible (and defended) self-harm in a way that cutting and anorexia are not. It’s just mental illness; has nothing to do with the claimed “owning my body” or “keeping away evil men.”
Though it is pretty hilarious when it does in fact repel those top 1% men they think they deserve. Love that. It makes me laugh a lot at how very enraged the horribly-disfigured tattooed women become when they realize that has happened.
The Nincompoops Who Say NIH
Containers, especially the Linux (as opposed to the FreeBSD) variant, are inherently less secure by nature than virtual machines.
Also, FYI, we sysadmin types can spin up VMs just as quickly as containers and have been able to do so for 20+ years. It’s just devs didn’t know anything about it and couldn’t control it, so they reinvented something we could already do — but poorly and very insecurely.
Veeam Fail
For the first time an LLM — Claude Opus 4.8 on High — solved a technical problem I would’ve never been able to solve. At least not in a reasonable amount of time. And I’m very, very good.
The problem manifested as I was installing Veeam Community Edition on an air-gapped Hyper-V server. The installer kept complaining it could not continue because it was unable find/validate certificates. So I researched and (get this) from the vendor’s own site I downloaded the missing certificates they claimed were needed. Installed them in the correct place in Windows Server. The Veeam install still failed after that.
As happens all too often, their own support page was incorrect and the certificate actually needed was not the one they had you download. Again, vendor’s own site, vendor’s own support pages. Totally incorrect.
Here is Claude’s summary of what was wrong and the fix:
“The certificate was in the box the whole time
Air-gapped a Windows box, then tried to install Veeam Community Edition. It refused with an Authenticode error: CERT_E_CHAINING, “a certificate chain could not be built to a trusted root authority.”
The cause is what air-gapping actually does. A connected Windows box doesn’t ship knowing every root it trusts; it fetches missing intermediates on demand and refreshes its trusted roots from Microsoft in the background. Cut the wire and both stop silently. The trust store just freezes at install-day state and starts declining signatures without telling you why.
I chased the roots first, including the ones Veeam lists on their own site. No luck: Veeam moved their code signing to an Entrust EV cert and never updated the page, so the root their installer needs isn’t on the list of roots they tell you to install.
The fix was to stop trusting the documentation and read the binary. An Authenticode signature embeds its own certificate chain, roots included — two here, one for the signature (Entrust) and one for the timestamp (DigiCert), each anchored to a root the air-gapped box had never seen. Pull them out of the file, drop them in the machine’s root store, done. No internet, no vendor KB.
The machine had everything it needed to verify that installer. It just wanted to phone a friend first, and I’d taken the phone away.”
More fake bullshit-ass security causing endless problems that makes you 0% more secure. Just clownish dipshittery. Veeam used to be good.
Functionality
I literally can’t function in hot weather – does anyone feel the same?
Nope. I can only function in hot weather. Or at least what most people would find to be too warm by far.
My brain shuts down below about 68 degrees. Can’t think, can barely move, don’t want to live.
Spread
I’ve been seeing a lot of doofs lately claiming that some study proves the Dunning-Kruger Effect isn’t real.
Just as with generational differences, of course it’s real. It’s just not easy to capture in your little science spreadsheets. There is a difference.
Dis Respect Dat Respect
Fuck this clown-ass nonsense.
Being consistently late is a moral failing and it is disrespectful. You are implicitly telling me that your time is more valuable than mine. One of the reasons I am almost never late is that I do not presume to believe my time is more valuable than anyone else’s. And I am one arrogant mofo so if I value your time just as much as my own, you can show me that courtesy as well.
I just stop dealing with people who are consistently late. It is literally not worth my time.
Graphic
Why, Microsoft. Why must you be like this. Who hurt you.
The thing is, though Graph is terrible, I am sure its replacement will be far worse.
Graph is very developer-y in that is extremely, absurdly verbose and also ridiculously complex. I’ve had similar experiences to the above. What used to be single-line commands are now 30-50 lines.
I was forced by MSOL deprecation to rewrite a Powershell script that I used rather commonly. It was around 100 lines long. It’s now 2,000 lines of Graph slop. And it’s not even as functional as the old one as actual capabilities were removed.
I do not understand why insane complexity is so appealing to dev types and I guess I never will.
Sweatbox
Damn I hate degrowthers.
Euphemism Schism
“Justice-affected.”
That’s a criminal. He did some crimes.
Freak In
Realized she was a complete Jesus freak after talking to her for a bit. She seemed cute and normal at work…but basically only talked about Jesus and her cat outside of the office.
Canceled that date.