They say, 30 is the age where you have to decide which one you like more: tying your shoelaces or hamburgers.

I chose the latter.

Now I’m almost 44 and even undoing them feels too hard. 🙃

I thought those nursery rhymes were because of the cat.

gorilla slippers

Good dog, those things are freaking scary.

hoser has a new video on how Saudi Arabia is getting ready for that part.

I would not say “not believe too much in your efforts”, I think the tendency to simply scale down enthusiasm can be toxic in its own way.

I like to remind myself of how Václav Havel said it:

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Yes, being enthusiastic about false goals can lead to devastating results. Being hopeful by realizing that your work does make sense even if you won’t necessarily see results of it, that’s much more sustainable source of motivation.

Also, remember that no matter how it turns out you will learn something on the path. If anything, this is one of the “certain” parts.

Remember, it’s not about filtering out robots, it’s about filtering out dangerous (as in spam, malware, etc.) things.

I mean, If you’re reeeeeeally good and reeeeeeally precise and reeeeally fast … then maybe you’re as dangerous as the robot. Maybe it’s just safer to keep you out. 🙃

Isn’t it kind of what Liberapay is doing?

Maybe I’m missing the point, but if you want to have union of maintainers/contributors, please go ahead, just be careful with assuming it can actually address the problem. You will never have any substantial percentage of maintainers. That’s kind of the main point of FLOSS: people do what they want to do, where they want to do.

If you want to collect data about what is used – with the goal of “not forgetting the little project with the library”, that’s also great but that’s going to be a lot of work and might be impossible to reflect. I can’t think about solution that would not be platform-specific.

Don’t get me wrong, uniting FLOSS developers along common goals, technology domains or philosophy, building communities and providing support systems is an absolute wonderful thing to do, even if you end up having what might feel like just a few projects.

Today I learned:

• curl development cycle has a cooldown after a freeze.

How cool is that?

Yeah, I phrased it weirdly, but that’s what I meant.

Just a follow-up with what I use now.

As a replacement, I ended up setting up Nextcloud AIO container set and so far the experience has been pretty good. I do occasionally have to go and do the update manually but the AIO interface makes it pretty straightforward.

The limitation is that I don’t have a very strong machine to host it. I have cheap VPS with only few gigs of RAM so I could give 2G to the nextcloud machine, which prevents me from enabling the more resource-hungry features, on the other hand the base NextCloud with caldav/carddav (which really is all I need) works fine.

Unfortunately later I learned that for some reason, somehow (surely my mistake), the only full copy of my dad’s contacts was at the nextcloud instance, so that collection was the “hostage”. Far more sadly, my dad deceased earlier this year, so in a weird irony when I received bill this time, the sad fact enabled me to put this all behind myself, so today I just canceled the service and goodbye.

activitywatch looks really good. thanks for the link!

rescuetime looks nice but is actually mac/win only.

I heard of Toggl but I can’t wrap my head around how – a web-based app can even know what i’m working on – in other tabs or outside browser (which for me is 90% of meaningful work)?

I recently bought a book which spoke to me by its cover and it was one of the best books I’ve read in ages. And I still love the cover almost as I love the book.

But then there are books where I really disliked the cover but they are still great to have and full of useful information. (Most of these are non-fiction…)

I think the idiom misses the mark: judging is just one part of it. Being aware that lot of your judgments are going to be wrong, especially if you use only one source of information – that is much more useful thing to keep in mind.

However, adages are (like) memes—the best ones don’t always win.

The point of a book cover is to cover the book.

well but doesn’t that beat the purpose of using the blockchain in the first place? why not just store everything in the auxiliary database?

…and 20G that needs to be replicated to tons of nodes if it should be really decentralized.

16-28 bytes seems extremely understated, I think it could easily be off by orders of magnitude.

Yes. I mean no, ehm, I mean “yes, I use the subscription feed”.

Pro tip: subscribe to @DinksterDaily to keep it organized. Thank me later.

having the purpose explained helps

But does it? I suppose it could be the opposite as well, right? It seems like there is some inherent hazard connected to the motivation of answering a “why” question. It can open Pandora’s box of misalignment.

I mean, what if I’m against malls? Then I could decide I want nothing to do with this button. (Or even purposefully sabotage it in some way.)

It’s hard to overstate how permanent and omnipresent this hazard is: Even if there was an objective truth about good vs. evil and it was accessible to any conscious being just by exploration and thinking, there still would be this hazard because one cannot know how close to this truth the other one is.

A crazy thought: Maybe that’s why we have all these kinds of weird social phenomena, from interpersonal struggles, mental illness to social structures like family, state, religion… all this inability of people to really pull together has something to do with nature managing this constant hazard of misalignment. It must be chaotic is because it’s evolution: the only strategy that works long-term is to have all kinds of strategies present all the time. Maybe it’s actually adaptive for society as a whole – that’s why trying to fix broken people and societies is such a steep uphill battle.

“Why” is scary.