Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

Welcome to Computer Fairies, where the ✨​sparkles✨​ are lively fairy dust, not lifeless AI slop.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@carstenfranke/117559201273902159

Boosted is a reminder that people voted, land didn't.

Docker, Alpine Linux, and musl are in computer security news today because there's a vulnerability exploitable via SSH in one very specific but somewhat common server configuration.

https://sshhole.com/

AI data center questions were on 45 ballots, separate from the 100s of ballots featuring candidates with strong opinions on AI & data centers.

Only one of them went in AI's favor: Harwood, ND, a suburb north of Fargo, with fewer than 1,000 voters.

To the question "AI?," the rest of the country gave a resounding "No!" answer. There's some hope yet.

Business Insider, undated, "This tiny North Dakota town was the only place to vote in support of data centers": https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-data-center-backlash-vote-election-harwood-north-dakota-2026-11?op=1

Whatever code or tech you touch:

Move purposefully and fix things.

And for the love of sanity, don't use a stupid autocomplete bot you have to pay for to write your manuals for you!

Write it yourself, & read what you write. Keep proofreading & understanding it like the people who actually use your program would.

If you write manuals just to tick a checkbox, you're part of the same problem as coders who don't write manuals, but you burn time, energy, patience, your name, & any semblance of good will you have as well.

Write for real folks to read.

If you make or maintain programs, don't forget to write & update their manuals. If you can't do technical writing, either learn how or find someone who can. The best programs in the world are useless or worse, if the only people who know how to use it are the ones who made it.

Don't forget to write for folks who don't know your program inside out. Write for folks who never used your program. Write for folks who just need to use your program for one thing & get on with their day.

I missed the 55th anniversary of the earliest Unix that came with a manual because it fell on the huge distraction of the USA's election day.

Oh, no. I'm just a few days younger than that manual.

Today's a good day to remember that every OS on every computer sucks, and it's only been made suckier by the techbro motto 'move fast and break things.'

Today's a good day for everyone touching computers and related technologies to reject tech dudebro culture and embrace a new motto:

Move purposefully and fix things.

I'm now at the point where I'm writing creative shellscripts but to boring and almost bureaucratic coding standards. They still run too fast for me to follow, so I don't need to shave nanoseconds with clever hacks. By being smart & refusing to be clever, my mistakes are obvious, easy to spot, & even easier to correct.

By refusing to move fast & break things, what I'm making will also refuse to do that, & it'll still probably come out faster & more robust than techbro drafts & slop.