

Near as I understand it: years ago some dumb engineering decisions were made, acknowledged, and corrected. Is there some recent scandal I’m out of the loop on?
Near as I understand it: years ago some dumb engineering decisions were made, acknowledged, and corrected. Is there some recent scandal I’m out of the loop on?
Sure! That’s an SMTP Relay. A lot of folks jumped on the poopoo wagon. It’s common wisdom in IT that you don’t do your own email. There are good reasons for that, and you should know why that sentiment exists, however; if you’re interested in running your own email: try it! Just don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Keep your third party service until you’re quite sure you want to move it all in-house (after due diligence is satisfied and you’ve successfully completed at least a few months of testing and smtp reputation warming).
Email isn’t complex. It’s tough to get right at scale, a pain in the ass if it breaks, and not running afoul of spam filtering can be a challenge. It rarely makes sense for even a small business to roll their own email solution. For an individual approaching this investigatively it can make sense so long as you’re (a.) interested in learning about it, (b.) find the benefits outweigh the risks, and (c.) that the result is worth the ongoing investment (time and labor to set up, secure, update, maintain, etc).
What’ll get you in trouble regardless is being dependent on that in-house email but not making your solution robust enough to always fill its role. Say you host at home and your house burns down. How inconvenient is it that your self-hosted services burned with it? Can you recover quickly enough, while dealing with tragedy, that the loss of common utility doesn’t make navigating your new reality much more difficult?
That’s why it rarely makes sense for businesses. Email has become an essential gateway to other tooling and processes. It facilitates an incredible amount of our professional interactions. How many of your bills and bank statements and other important communication are delivered primarily by email? An unreliable email service is intolerable.
If you’re going to do it make sure you’re doing it right, respecting your future self’s reliance on what present-you builds, and taking it slow while you learn (and document!) how all the pieces fit together. If you can check all of those boxes with a smile then good luck and godspeed says I.
The features would break if they were built in.
You can’t know that and I can’t imagine it would be true. If the plugins many folks find essential were incorporated into GNOME itself then they’d be updated where necessary as a matter of course in developing a new release.
GNOME has clear philosophy and they work for themselves, not for you so they decide what features they care to invest time and what features they don’t care about.
You’re not wrong! This is an arrogant and common take produced in poor taste though. A holdover from the elitism that continues to plague so many projects. Design philosophy leads UX decision making and the proper first goal for any good and functional design is user accessibility. This is not limited to accomodations we deem worthy of our attention.
Good artists set ego aside to better serve their art. Engineers must set pet peeves aside to better serve their projects. If what they find irksome gets in the way of their ability to build functionally better bridges, homes, and software then it isn’t reality which has failed to live up to the Engineer’s standards. This is where GNOME, and many other projects, fall short. Defenders standing stalwart on the technical correctness of a volunteer’s lack of obligation to those whose needs they ostensibly labor for does not induce rightness. It exposes the masturbatory nature of the facade.
Engineers have every right to bake in options catering to their pet peeves (even making them the defaults). That’s not the issue. When those opinions disallow addressing the accessibility needs of those who like and use what they’ve built there is no justification other than naked pride. This is foolish.
Having a standardised method for plugins is in my opinion good enough, nobody forces you to use extensions. And if you don’t want extensions to break, then wait till the extensions are ready prior updating GNOME.
I agree! Having a standardized method for plugins is good, however; the argument which follows misses the point. GNOME lucked into a good pole position as one of the default GNU/Linux DEs and has enjoyed the benefit of that exposure. Continuing to ignore obvious failures in method elsewhere while enshrining chosen paradigms of tool use as sacrosanct alienates users for whom those paradigms are neither resonant nor useful.
No one will force Engineers to use accessibility features they don’t need. Not needing them doesn’t justify refusing the build them. Not building them as able is an abdication of social responsibility. If an engineer does not believe they have any social responsibility then they shouldn’t participate in projects whose published design philosophy includes language such as:
Their walk isn’t matching their talk in a few areas and it is right and good to call them to task for it.
Post statement: This is coming from someone who drives Linux daily, mostly from the console, and prefers GNOME to KDE. All of the above is meant without vitriol or ire and sent in the spirit of progress and solidarity.
Uh oh. Was someone grumpyyyyy? Poor thing. Thanks so much for taking the time to leave such an insightful and well considered contribution to the discussion. Invaluable stuff.
TL;DR: Check out the KeyChron K3 V2 Non-Backlight edition. Decent quality, inexpensive, no lights, and no knowledge required.
ZSA make good stuff, sell it at reasonable prices, provide incredible support, and give a shit about artists/humans/the world. Any time mechanical keyboards are mentioned I feel compelled to inject their name into the conversation. I’ve owned a Moonlander for a while now and I have nothing but good things to say about it. I’d recommend the ZSA Voyager for someone checking out not shitty keyboards for the first time.
With that out of the way: it’s tough to find a lightless mech keyboard these days because backlights make sense and, so long as you’re putting lights behind keycaps, you might as well use full color range LEDs and let the user set a low brightness white color or turn them off if they don’t care for it. Some companies make non-backlight versions (KeyChron’s K series for instance) but they’re a rarity. Why produce and stock inventory that’s not moving?
I recommend doing some research on how mechanical keyboards are built (watch a 10 minute video on the internet) and then using RTINGS’ keyboard table for some comparison shopping. You’re looking for a well rated keyboard with hot swappable PCBs designed to accommodate south-facing LEDs (they point down - less bright). One of the advantages of going mechanical is customization. Don’t want the LEDs at all? Remove them from your build. Even without PCB hot swapping: no one will stop you desoldering LEDs from your keyboard.
Building out something like a Gem80 from NuPhy or a 60HE from Wooting will net you a high quality mechanical keyboard that won’t get in your way but is customizable enough for you to avoid RGB-induced eye sores.
The only effective answer to organized greed is organized labor.
Unionizing every industry so there is nowhere for the owning class to practice naked greed sans consequence or feel any pressure to do otherwise is our only answer. It’s not one which matches the aesthetic or level of ease most are looking for. So that’s the current goal. Shift public perception of unions and collective bargaining from “talking about that will get me fired” to “unionization is essential for any working class person”. Shift the current climate from “violence is inevitable” to “striking is necessary”.
Our owners cannot steal our wages if we refuse to produce goods and services for them. Yes this means workers will experience pain. Not being able to pay bills, buy groceries, etc. This is the intention of the current economic reality we find ourselves locked in mortal combat with. Keeping us too scared to bite the hand that feeds for us to realize we can starve out our oppressors by doing nothing and being loud about it. Picketing is a siege on the fortress of oligarchy.
They concentrate wealth like dragons protecting a hoard not for the love of money. It’s not about the money. It’s about insulating themselves so securely from such a siege that we starve before they do. History tells us that’s a winning strategy. It’s how the aristocracy survived and evolved into the modern era. Knowing this we can reason about what is necessary to avoid repeating the past.
One may argue for governing reforms, better voting systems, government-backed protections for workers, more public sector jobs/industries, kai ta hetera, et cetera, and so on… And these things may help voters weed out elitists/sympathizers or insulate an industry for a few decades. They are placations though. Not solutions. These capitulations leave workers in stasis and package today’s injustice up as an inheritance for those next in the human assembly line. That sounds like deja vu to me.
Similarly goes violent direct action. Yes, the civil rights movement was lifted by the pressure or the threat of violence from aligned and allied movements and, yes, such methods may yield short term results in any righteous struggle. No, workers do not require the same assistance for success. Labor is not fighting against any government. Governance is the medium through which the owning class wishes to arbitrate. Refuse this entrapment. No one is coming to save us.
Organize, vocalize, and strike, or lose.
Long time guitar owner here. You could get some wood glue and use a small amount to affix the chip back to the guitar pretty seamlessly so long as you’ve got a steady hand. In my experience it’s harder than it looks.
My direct advice? Keep the missing chunk in a safe place and live with the guitar as-is for a month. There’s no rush and this will give you some time to process.
If the gouge ends up sticking in your mind as something you want gone? Call a local luthier, explain what happened, that you’d like it restored, and ask for an estimate or evaluation if you want to budget for the expense. If you have a preference for a kind of repair you can ask for that too. Mending a wound on an instrument can be an opportunity to add beauty instead of simply removing a blemish. What kind of repair you want is entirely up to you and a temp fix now might make the repair more difficult / expensive.
If none of that sounds appealing and if after a few weeks the idea of a nail polish scar or other punky hack makes you happy then go for it! It’s your instrument and best is conditional so go nuts. 🙂
My only concern with leaving the natural wood exposed would be moisture and cracking/paint flaking over time. Even if you think the chip looks bad ass and you end up wanting to keep it: I would ask a luthier to seal it up to preserve the instrument (battle-scar and all).
Would you elaborate on this concern? I’m not sure I understand but I’d like to.
And a one 🎶 and a two 🎶 and a one, two - one two three four!
Your closing sentence hints at the root of the misunderstanding here. It also fails to strengthen your initial claim at all. This study’s Lay summary sets it out perfectly.
Many autistic individuals report feelings of excessive empathy, yet their experience is not reflected by most of the current literature, typically suggesting that autism is characterized by intact emotional and reduced cognitive empathy. To fill this gap, we looked at both ends of the imbalance between these components, termed empathic disequilibrium. We show that, like empathy, empathic disequilibrium is related to autism diagnosis and traits, and thus may provide a more nuanced understanding of empathy and its link with autism.
Autistic folks don’t always exhibit the socially defined traits of autism. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, right? So while your [claim] [double-down] [pre-emptive concession] [claim] ends with a claim that’s reasonable it is also fundamentally disconnected from the initial claim (which is, at best, half-true). Social and non-social traits are additional dimensions on a complex spectrum. Defining autism only by its more visible / stigmatized traits perpetuates the false equivocations of abnormal with disordered and disordered with diseased.
Sent with love ❤️
This is admittedly a bit pedantic but it’s not that the risk doesn’t exist (there may be quite a lot to gain from having your info). It’s because the risk is quite low and the benefit is worth the favorable gamble. Not dissimilar to discussing deeply personal health details with medical professionals. Help begins with trust.
There’s an implicit trust (and often an explicit and enforceable legal agreement in professional contexts (trust, but verify)) between sys admins and troubleshooters. Good admins want quiet happy systems and good devs want to squash bugs. If the dev also dons a black hat occasionally they’d be idiotic to shit where they eat. Not many idiots are part of teams that build things lots of people use.
edit: ope replied to the wrong comment
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I’m excited to see they’re going fully open source. Looks like the last steps to making the sync server self-hostable are in the works. Do you use their paid service? If so: any complaints or caveats?
Start here: https://nesslabs.com/how-to-think-better This isn’t an endorsement (though I do like ness labs). That article offers practical evidence-based starting points and additional resources at the end.
There are many people/systems/schools that will offer strategies and solutions. Some are practical and effective. None of them are a replacement for learning what it means to think well, learning how to think well, or actually thinking well.
The next step is learning the jargon of philosophy so you can ask meaningful questions and parse the answers (this is true for any new discipline). I recommend reading anything on the topics of epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, which resonate with you. Then find others to discuss what you’ve read. You do not have to be right or knowledgeable to earn a voice in the conversation: only an interest in discovering how you might be wrong and helping others discern the same for themselves.
If you haven’t read any classical philosophy but are interested I recommend Euthyphro. It’s brief, poignant, and entertaining.
I hope this helps! Happy to discuss further as well.
Signal.
Wired had an interview with Signal’s President last year that I found enlightening and provided an entry point for me to self educate further. Here’s an archive.org snapshot of it: https://web.archive.org/web/20240828100224/https://www.wired.com/story/meredith-whittaker-signal/
For the click-averse here’s an excerpt I find compelling: