• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Sometimes it’s hard to know whether it’d be better, as a blueberry bush, to be relocated from harm’s way or to hold out hope that the path of destructive changes will be routed around the ground they grow in. Those making the changes to the soil probably won’t prioritize them, even if those who are stewards of their particular patch of soil do.

    Transplanting can be a shock, and it’s hard to know what the situation is beneath the surface before it’s time to put down roots and see how they grow. It’s probably a good strategy for many of these plants, but it leaves uncertainty for each individual patch.

    It’s definitely a lot to think about. For blueberries.





  • It’s not, though. It’s a much wider potential for failure, as there are a great number of dependencies that are often left to individual developers to maintain. That may be a somewhat reasonable amount of risk when you’ve got multiple options for dependencies and no major target, but when the entire EU relies on single individual maintainers? That’s a massively exploitable threat vector. It would be absurd to assume no one will take advantage given what we’ve already seen.

    It would be an extremely foolish move to put the whole EU’s security on one single set of open source dependencies. Microsoft at least has a financial and legal incentive to try to prevent straight up breaches by state actors, shitty as they may be. There’s no such resource allocation or responsibility when it comes to open source repos.

    Push a switch to Linux, by all means, but security monoculture is as big a mistake as putting your eggs in any other single basket, especially one as exposed as one single distro.












  • That’s a really weird way of framing a hobbyist who isn’t being paid using their free time to code what they feel like coding. It seems to me that people who show up and make demands about what someone else does are literally attempting to dictate how that person spends their time. Someone coding what they want, rather than coding what other people want them to code, is just… independent? Autonomous? Do you really think that someone spending their free time how they want to constitutes being a ‘mini dictator’?

    It sounds to me like some end users like to have power over others and feel entitled to dictate how those who make the things they use spend their time.

    Personally, my suggestion to people with that attitude would be that they learn to make what they want themselves rather than demanding that others do it.



  • I feel like listening to your gut is a big component of this. There have been times when I notice that the way someone talks bothers me for a reason I can’t put my finger on and I decide to give them the benefit of the doubt, assuming I’m being shallow or unreasonable, but then a few months or even years later their behavior lines up with my initial discomfort and I realize I had spotted something being off from the start. Sometimes it’s better to listen to the general feeling you’re getting from the less verbal and analytical parts of yourself than to wait until you have a real explanation.

    Of course, there may be people who are just anxious or a little eccentric and that’s what you’re spotting, but usually it’s worth at least sniffing it out from a distance rather than fully ignoring those feelings until you can articulate the reason for them.


  • It seems like a pretty good survival strategy for a species to routinely produce a number of different sorts of constituent organisms in order to have the tools ready to be more adaptable to varying circumstances. Considering how much humans specialize their routine behaviors and the way in which we work together both consciously and through larger interconnected systems, it isn’t surprising to see a variety of strategies to process information, make decisions, and communicate with one another. Thinking outside the status quo creates opportunities that can independently either succeed or fail of their own applicability and ability to be executed. If everyone is looking for the same things, they’re likely to miss a lot. Even if many of those arrangements don’t produce the desired result, they can be a valuable exploration for new resources and strategies.

    It seems an extremely dire mistake in these circumstances to label one particular mode of thought the ideal and reject all contradiction as dysfunctional or useless.