FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

#ActuallyAutistic

Funny error message from old Intel webcam software. Apparently in 2001 they never thought anyone would have more than 2 GB of RAM in Windows XP, so on my ThinkPad X60 with 4 GB of RAM (3 GB usable by the OS) it wraps around and reports a negative number.

unlike many obscure US federal agencies, what this one does is entirely out in the open. you can, for example, watch their (incredibly well-produced) videos accompanying their written reports, that they've been making for two decades. that's why i know about them of course

they are of course attacking it because of the very independence that is its whole purpose. it's not part of the EPA or OSHA because both of those bodies would have vested interests that would affect their conclusions. it doesn't have regulatory powers for the same reason.

oh fuck off. the current us administration is trying to kill the chemical safety board, which costs the federal government really just peanuts, but it does excellent independent investigations of industrial accidents free from political interference. bleak https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/us-plans-to-close-chemical-safety-board-by-october/4021610.article

I'm fixing the original sin of PC keyboards: they don't know their own layout and can't report it to the connected computer

my keyboard now has a filesystem.
this is highly normal behavior for a keyboard

Me, buying cool art for my wall at cons: Haha fuck yeah!! Yes!!

Me, trying to figure out later how to frame and mount these arbitrarily sized prints: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

digging around in my 2K Marin-era (2008-ish) archives and came across this outstanding error message, props to whatever IT(?) person decided to phrase a simple seat license conflict as "Human Combat Required":

The Real Unvarnished Actual Trans Agenda Revealed!

I just want to remind people of some recent numbers. In a huge survey of USan people under the age of 25, it found that approximately 20% of youth identified as nonbinary. The same percentage of girls were bisexual.

And nearly 3% of the people under 25 identified as binary trans (trans masculine - a person thought to be a girl who is in fact a boy - or trans feminine - a person thought to be a boy who is in fact a girl).

So...if you know 100 people under 25...at least three of them are likely to be trans. If your town in Alabama has 100 teenage girls, at least three of those "girls" are boys. *You already know many trans people*. What you don't know is that they are *trans*. Whether you're ever going to know those people well is down to how you choose to behave. Nothing more. If you make them unwelcome, odds are good they'll go away, and you'll never see them again, and probably nor will their family. If that feels good to you...you have my sympathy. Whatever hurt you must have been monstrous.

Being trans is something you're born with. We don't know what brings that about, but the phenomenon is ancient and well-known. Science was being done 100 years ago about us. Surgeries, hormones, psychological assessment, all of it, developed in Berlin before 1933. When the Germans (Nazis - I'm reposting this from somewhere that word will get my comment censored) burned it all, all the research.

This is not new. It's not sudden. Like the phenomenon of visibly left-handed people, it is changing because we have stopped making it impossible for it to change.

Our radical agenda is three short words: "Let. Us. Live."

eating a tomato in 5 minutes then getting back to work is easy enough the first few times but goddamn by the end of the day I am struggling

the pomodoro technique, where you work for 25 minutes then stop and eat a tomato,

that reminded me of this meme which I'll put here for easy future access

Happy Pride, Everyone.

the memoir of my dystopic time at Google now features illustrations! one for each section, carefully curated for thematic relevance and guaranteed to bring colour to your day.

https://wordsmith.social/elilla/deep-in-mordor-where-the-shadows-lie-dystopian-stories-of-my-time-as-a-googler

@fabio I saw an example of this up close back when I briefly worked at Google, in 2008. (not a good year to start a new career, as it turned out). back then they made a big deal out of something called "20% time"—the idea that regular engineers hade 1/5 of their time for themselves, to do anything they wanted. famously Gmail came out of someone exploring their interests during this time.

I don't think much of anything else came out of it. I found out I was always overworked on drudgery; my job was basically fixing bugs on the Ruby on Rails internal user accounting system that someone else had developed. when I complained that this was a far cry of the academia-like exciting research environment I had been promised and asked to be assigned to a more challenging project, I was told: "no". moreover the deadlines and expectations were of the type that if I worked (unpaid) overtime (at an underpaid job for the market) every day, I still was at risk of a performance review. making use of "20% time" felt like a pipe dream.

like most people I blamed myself for my laziness, until I saw "Googlegeist" statistics that some 95% of employees never used their "20% time", being trapped under the same pressures as I was.

I started a discussion about the promise of "20% free time" being what was known in ancient Samarkand as "a lie". the result of this was my boss having a fit over me having "backstabbed" him. see, me complaining about the promises of recruiters being unrealistic marked me as an Unhappy Googler, which means my manager had Unhappiness in his team. and Google's image was of being the best place to work where everybody was happy all the time. Unhappiness isn't allowed.

I said, "didn't you say we operate under 'radical transparency'?" (I was young and believed this kind of thing. yes I was a sitting duck.) boss said, and I quote, "radical transparency doesn't mean you get to say negative things."

I was fired not long after, allegedly because of the crisis, when they laid of 70% of the Latinoamerican precariat.