Esme Povirk @madewokherd@computerfairi.es
Joined Aug 2018
Esme Povirk
boosted
Every time conditions worsen, someone starts pushing the idea of a general strike. Shut it all down! Starve the system! And yeah, it sounds powerful—but here’s what they don’t tell you:
It’s a honeypot.
And no shade with this subpost, but:
If you're suggesting one? It tells me how theoretical and abstract your current relationship to our times is: your post probably isn't going to start a general strike - even though a prosecutor would have no trouble arguing that.
You see...
Under U.S. law, organizing a general strike—especially across industries—is straight-up illegal. The Taft-Hartley Act (1947) makes it a felony to advocate for a mass strike across sectors. Courts ruled long ago that calls for general strikes count as criminal conspiracy—which is why labor leaders, radicals, and workers have been crushed every time they tried to organize one.
Think about that: The state doesn’t just want you working, it wants you to believe striking is an option—so they can catch you the second you push too far. They let the words circulate, they let people dream about it, but they’ve ensured that the mechanisms for a general strike are dead on arrival.
So what do we do?
Instead of fighting on their terms, we need to cultivate the material conditions of a general strike without setting ourselves up for repression. The goal isn’t a moment of resistance; it’s a slow, grinding attrition against capital’s demands.
This is something workers and business owners in China have long understood. Within an economy that monitors, tracks, and punishes direct defiance, workers and small business owners have built an entire ecosystem of passive, small-scale disruption:
躺平 (Tangping) – “Lying flat”: Refusing to overwork, avoiding excessive consumption, cutting down on participation in capitalist growth.
摸鱼 (Moyu) – “Touching fish”: Finding ways to slack off at work, do personal tasks on company time, and subtly resist productivity expectations.
Small business "slowdowns": Deliberately taking longer to fulfill orders, delaying processes, and subtly reducing efficiency to limit corporate extraction.
All of these are done within the boundaries of legality, while still achieving the material slowdown that a strike would bring.
Instead of calling for a general strike and waiting for someone to deliver it, start cultivating these practices. The goal isn’t just to “not work”—it’s to starve capital without painting a target on your back. If millions engage in passive disruption, undercut overconsumption, and prioritize resource-sharing over waged survival, we create the material slowdown that capital dreads.
They’ve made a general strike impossible. So we don’t give them one. We give them something worse: an economy that bleeds out, quietly, without a single illegal call to action.
@b0rk I was switching between operating systems a lot and wanted a text editor that would be the same everywhere. And I tend to gravitate towards simple+foss+available in my package manager on Linux.
@mavica_again This is the loop I saw one using:
for f in *.bdf; do
if grep -Fq 'FAMILY_NAME "' "$f" 2>/dev/null; then
family_name="$(grep -F 'FAMILY_NAME "' "$f")"
family_name="${family_name%\"}"
family_name_otb="$family_name (OTB)"
sed -i "s/$family_name/$family_name_otb/" "$f"
fi
fonttosfnt -b -c -g 2 -m 2 -o "${f/bdf/otb}" "$f"
done
@mavica_again The way most the AUR packages seem to do it is by downloading BDF fonts and using a program to convert them. The one in my screenshot is in xfonts-75dpi.
@mavica_again Seems squished in some places. I was hoping it would use the bitmaps that I was pretty sure were in Arial, but I guess not.
@mavica_again Would this be acceptable? I can't tell how it looks because I'm on a high DPI screen and it's really tiny.
@mavica_again Apparently, yes https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fonts#Bitmap but it seems like the ones listed that still work (otb) are all fixed width.
AI rant
Guys, the new magic language generating machine is producing a grammatical, well-formed, but factually incorrect English response to an arbitrary question I asked it, also in English. And it's a question my complex biological brain that evolved for language processing could have correctly answered after a mere 4 years of training. I have no idea how the machine works, nor does anyone really, but I expected perfect accuracy and am shocked that it does not work better.
Resolves to never make an official build outside of a CI process again
Esme Povirk
boosted
@mcc Whenever I am coaching new engineers who are trying to figure out what to do now that they built something and it doesn't work, I tell them this;
"Verify that everything you think is true, actually *is* true. For anything that isn't or is unexpected, find out *why*."
At the end of that exercise they will nearly always know what the problem is.
@giomasce Kind of? It seems to require consistency still, and I'm sure there's a lot of other stuff that matters, but increasing scheduled rest time from 8 hours to 9 did seemingly pay for itself in my case, once my body got used to it.
What I lack in sleep quality I make up in sleep quantity.
@transfaeries now that you mention it, I seem to remember something about a server running out of disk space?
@transfaeries I can't see it. Oddly, the image link is a 403.
stream announcement
Streaming random pattern mode in HyperRogue. https://twitch.tv/madewokherd
Nice! I use plex for my music. I like making playlists of categories.
After a year of working on this, I have made a new release branch and new release of Mono.
Didn't put it in the commit message but did put it in the release notes today. https://gitlab.winehq.org/mono/mono/-/releases/mono-6.14.0
Joined Aug 2018
