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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • First, I’m sorry that you find yourself in this situation.

    Second, there’s no magic bullet that’s going to get you out of this. A tight budget might help, and perhaps tinkering at the edges might get you a little closer.

    There’s a few things that might help:

    1. Check what your paying for what. Can you save a few bucks by switching contacts? Phone companies are crap at offering good deals to existing customers, for example. Make sure your not paying for any long-forgotten warranty given in your account.

    2. Upskill yourself: things like Alison offer free training, and a small cost for the certificate. While not enough to match a degree, that can give you the leg up to the next pay band. Often worth checking out New Skills Academy as well for offers.

    3. Check out your local college/university for free short courses. Many of them will do short courses that can help improve you’re CV. Even if they are just in a subject you’re interested in, having a university course on a CV can really help.

    4. Google your CV type: every type of work has a different CV requirement. Some want the biggest qualification first, some want a skill profile. We’ve all been taught to do a CV, but there are hundreds of different ways to do it. Check out what’s popular in your line of work, and update accordingly

    5. Job hunt now: if your current job isn’t paying the bills, it’s time to job hunt. Look at the salary you need, then what you need to know to do the job. If you have 70% of what they are asking for, apply. Luck plays a bigger part in job hunting than we like to think.

    6. Side hustle or not to side hustle: if you have a salaried job with regular hours, check your contract. It’s always good to know what requirements your current job has on having a second job. If your not feeling like a content creator, then Only Fans may not be for you: unless you happen to be really well endowed with good features. If that’s out, consider an evening job or weekend job. You might be able to pick up a few hours stacking shelves at your corner shop, or on the till/cash register. Two nights a week might be enough to help you make those ends meet. You can also try side-hustles like dog walking, or handy-person. Perhaps even a paid befriending service for the elderly (be aware there may be legal requirements in your area)

    7. Plan: having a goal helps keep you focused. Knowing what job you’d like to do will help you work out what training and skills you need. Having a goal being that can also make the grind of two jobs easier as you can see yourself building towards a goal.

    These are some broad-brush ideas that I hope gives you the idea that is it’s not totally hopeless.


  • There are two tensions here:

    1. Community building
    2. Code production

    Community building can be done without any coding, coding can be done without any community. However, to build a large project you need them both.

    In a large volunteer project like this, not everything can be worked on. You become selective. We are going to major on this thing, or specifically talk about that project to get community engagement and get the thing done. This drives the project, she helps it to stop chasing hairs. Someone has to decide what feature is going in this release to make it ready to be a release candidate.

    That group of people, ultimately making and influencing those decisions, is the CoC.

    Let’s take a for-instance: Sign up boxes.

    For years, Linux sign up allows you to record random data into your profile, office, phone number, etc. These are text, and can be anything. Now, what if there’s a rising need to add a minicom number(minix, used to be used by the deaf to send messages to an organisation, before email). As a hearing person, this is going to be a low priority for me, so I work on something else. I’ve got spare capacity, so if the project leaders are calling for help on this thing, I can go and help.

    This, ultimately, builds a better over-all product, but it’s not something I’d have noticed by myself, because I’m not part of the deaf community.

    In our example with NixOS, asking for someone from the community to be a representative on it is not about code quality, but about the issue of visibility. Is there some need that that section of the community needs? Is there a way that the community can do y thing to make the os as a whole more accessible? I don’t know the answer, because I’m not a member of that community, just as I’m not a member of the deaf community.

    In this case, the merit, the qualification, for being on the CoC is being a member of a section of the community. It brings valuable a viewpoint, and adds a voice at the table that can make a real difference. Most coders know that having a wish list of features at the start can make it infinitely easier to add them, than having to go back an rewrite to make them happen. Having a voice that might need that feature makes a difference

    The debate for CoC is about merit, but merit isn’t just stubbornly focused on a single talent, it can also be about life experience.


  • Choose an unclear gender (other, agender, etc) and your data becomes less useful. Marketing campaigns are based on broad categories, like male or female, so choosing neither lowers your data’s value.

    Similarly, lie about your education and your employment. Pick a made up job, be a wizard, or a spaceman. Jobs, again, are wide categories, so nonsense jobs, the more niche the better, the less they have to market things to you.

    In theory you can do the same with hobbies, but three points of data, even made up data, is sellable somewhere.

    Lie, of course, if you can. I’m sure there are more denizens of Hell on Facebook than the real place.

    Where possible, choose other.




  • I would be very interested in the list of banned books, and how it would be curated.

    For 64gb, you might have to extend the years to be: banned books ever, and then break down that list by reason. Just to fill space you’d end up including dubious books, and you’d need to be clear on where/who/why a book got banned.

    A book being ‘banned’ from a pre-school for being ‘not age appropriate’ by some pointless helicopter parent wouldn’t count unless the book was actually age appropriate.

    Then you would need a category of ‘banned by author banned’(or similar). Books that were considered age appropriate at the time, but now definitely aren’t. I’m thinking here of the recent removal/editing of Dr Seuss books to remove problematic racial stereotype. Not necessarily banned in their original form, perhaps, but still censored (perhaps, rightly so for the target age).

    64GB is a lot of books. You would end up even including ‘The tale of (Darth) Pelagius’

    (Pelagius was considered a heretic in the early years of the church, and his writings were banned)



  • The last time I saw this was on a slow-failing HDD.

    Check a quick fsck might get you a few answers. You can find more info in the Linux manual. It could just be one or two bad blocks that you can recover and fix the problem (though, ofc, it’s time to backup your data).

    The other, slightly unusual time I’ve seen it is with mixed RAM. 16gb made of 2x6g and then 2x4gb did some real odd things to the system. If it’s not the disk, and your box will boot with one stick of ram, try it to see if it fixes the issue. It could be that your RAM speeds are off (or your like me and just put two sticks you had lying around, and it basically worked until it didn’t).

    An outlier, that I’ve not seen on modern machines is io/wait for a CD-ROM to spin up, even if your not accessing the CD-ROM. Normally caused by bad cabling. Based on the age of your machine, this is unlikely, but it might be worth unplugging devices to see if one is bad and not reporting properly.

    This is, if course, assuming dmsg is empty

    Final thought: see if your running SELinux. If you are, turn it off and try again. Those policies are complex, and something installed in a non-standard place could be causing SELinux to slow IO as it fills your logs with warnings.

    Hope that helps,








  • I think it is very much a case of developers building, or expanding apps. It’s easy to forget that many of these apps are in their developments infancy, because so (technically speaking) is the server software.

    There will also, inevitably, be an interplay between app developer and server developer. Work arounds producing accepted items that other apps need to include (for those that remember, think text colour codes on IRC, mostly driven by mIRC (short have history, YMMV, etc etc)

    Mind you, I’m wondering if all this federation will bring people back to IRC…