Mike Knell

@dgerard Sometimes I feel like a hospital doctor who’s worked in the clap clinic for decades and has had a series of name badges starting with “Venereal Disease” and passing through “Special Clinic” on the way to “Sexual Health Clinic”. Same thankless job, just different labels.

@dgerard @Soyweiser I thought we were SREs now. At least, the message for years was “Sysadmins are useless shit now because they aren’t software engineers and hell, they don’t even call themselves engineers”.

@db0 u wot m8

@mawhrin To misuse an old engineering joke, is an LLM a Turbo Confabulator?

@gnomicutterance There’s also a handy-dandy map there showing how in the “developed” (I use the term advisedly, as usual) world the English-speaking countries are obvious outliers.

@gnomicutterance @VirtualOdour Well, exactly. For the benefit of Mr Odour here, I’m in Austria (that’s the one without the kangaroos) where although physical punishment of children was first made an explicit offence in 1989 the “right” of parents to hit their children was removed from §145 of the Allgemeine Bürgerliche Gesetzbuch in 1977. Here’s the 1811 text that was deleted. Happy now?

@V0ldek @self And not just the song title - the lyrics are so on point all the way through:

You still think swastikas look cool
The real Nazis run your schools
They’re coaches, businessmen and cops
In a real fourth Reich you’ll be the first to go

@Soyweiser @gerikson Plus the sets of “people who can DJ competently” and “people who are convinced that they should be allowed to DJ in public” do not, unfortunately, overlap completely.

@dgerard @froztbyte I always tell people that the reason so many systems nerds (I don’t use BOFH any more as that’s… not really an attitude I like identifying with, it hasn’t aged well) use Macs. It’s because once you get back from work, frankly, the LAST thing you want to do is system administration on your home machine and OS X is just *nix enough.

@gerikson Eh, I grew up in a family of doctors. They’d discuss their workdays at the dinner table. I fear nothing. Let’s have a read, see what all the fuss is ab… (turns green, excuses self)

@fasterandworse Published a book about hypertext two years before the Web… but two years after Hypercard.

@Tar_alcaran @V0ldek That’s why you need the good guy with a hammer!

@raoul Strong “that kid at primary school who took a few weeks of karate lessons then told you he could easily kill you so he had to be careful not to lose his temper now” vibes.

@fasterandworse @dgerard sorry, too busy dealing with my brain short-circuiting at the idea that anyone would think any of this was intended to benefit the poors.

@strangebirds @V0ldek I’d like to think that every human cryo facility has a “Days Since Last Accidental Thawing-Out” sign. Or maybe “Days Since Last Midnight Dumping of Several Lumpy Sacks”.

@gerikson Or an Italian.

@corbin I can’t believe I’m defending this odious guy, but this kind of “don’t interfere in our internal affairs, foreigners” stuff is exactly the same playbook that countries like Russia and China and Iran roll out when they get criticised for, you know, declaring LGBTQA+ folk to be terrorists or sending people to labour camps because they’re inconvenient. The guy has the right to express whatever shitty opinions he wants about the US, but that doesn’t mean anyone has to listen, and the real problem here is that people in the US right are so willing to use this guy as a useful idiot in exchange for a bit of attention and the occasional wad of cash. This is exactly what you see from the above mentioned countries - “look, these foreigners agree with us, stop being mean about us!”.

Hell, Russia and Iran both have entire TV networks (RT and Press TV) dedicated to this kind of useful idiocy but in their cases they’re intended for foreign consumption. The US equivalent is Fox News - but that’s aimed at the US market, which is kind of an interesting difference.

@froztbyte How many US citizens actually renounce their citizenship, though? It’s been deliberately made into a difficult and expensive process, especially under Trump, because they have an obsession with the idea that the only reason any US citizen would want to stop being one is to evade tax.

And as a UK citizen who hasn’t lived in the UK for 15 years UK domestic policy still very much affects my life - not least a few years ago when the lunatics pushed us out of the EU and my family and I lost a whole load of basic rights in the country in which we now live. And I reserve the right to critique any government I want if it’s behaving in a shitty manner - why should the US be immune from criticism while it’s perfectly acceptable to slag off awful regimes like Saudi Arabia, Iran and yes, even that in our next door neighbour, Hungary? The US isn’t immune from criticism just because they wear clean shirts while mistreating marginalised folk.

@averyminya @swlabr It’s funny because it’s racist!

@swlabr @skillissuer Not sure what a Bill Burr is but that’s a traditionally idiotic statement. Doping in cycling isn’t about steroids and hasn’t been for decades - it’s an endurance sport so these days when it occurs it’s all about the blood doping, all EPO and transfusions and stuff to get your red cell count as high as possible. This is a really dangerous thing to do if you want to avoid joining the list of young cyclists who dropped dead of mysterious heart problems in the last 20 years, and if you suddenly start saying *that* is okay there will be a lot more kids having cardiac arrests because their blood resembles Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup.